People Who Help Us

dymo/stencil #036 - tsai ming-liang

2012-01-12T00:03:00.011+11:00


Tsai Ming-liang, outside Top Video Flash in High St, Northcote. (Hopefully his films are available for rental inside the store.)

2. The terrible truth

Separating and letting go (from the herd, from false communion) may be obligatory steps towards individuation and becoming one’s own self – the key to the ultimate ability to break free, but increasingly this process reveals a terrible truth: our essential aloneness - even (and especially) from those we’re closest to.

Pistorius knows it – but, as he discloses to fellow seeker Emil Sinclair, he isn’t prepared to renounce the warmth of the herd for the solitary quest-to-know:

“...I can’t do that, I am incapable of it. Perhaps you will be able to do it one day. It is difficult, it is the only truly difficult thing there is. I have often dreamed of doing so, but I can’t; the idea fills me with dread: I am not capable of standing so naked and alone. I, too, am a poor weak creature who needs warmth and food and occasionally the comfort of human companionship. Someone who seeks nothing but his own fate no longer has any companions, he stands quite alone and has only cold universal space around him...And actually this is the path one should follow. People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual. But you must shed that, too, if you want to go all the way to the end...” (Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919; tr. Roloff and Lebeck 1970).

Knulp knows it, too – but isn’t tormented by it. His separation is measured and matter-of-fact:

“...I’ve had two loves in my life, real ones I mean, and each time I knew it would last forever and could end only with death, but each time it ended, and I didn’t die. I had a friend too...and I thought we’d never part. But we did part...”

“...no matter how close two human beings may be, there is always a gulf between them which only love can bridge, and that only from hour to hour.”

“Every human being has his soul, he can’t mix it with any other. Two people can meet, they can talk with one another, they can be close together. But their souls are like flowers, each rooted to its place. One can’t go to another, because it would have to break away from its roots, and that it can’t do” (Hermann Hesse, Knulp, 1915; tr. Manheim 1971).

Tristan knows the terrible truth, as well - and attempts to evade it by means of self-obliteration masked as eternal love-fulfilment. During the sublime duet in Act II, Scene II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the lovers denounce the Day when they must keep apart and praise the Night when they can be together:

Oh, sink down upon us, night of love
Make me forget I live
Take me into your bosom
Free me from the world.
...
Holy twilight's
Glorious presentiment
Obliterates the horror of delusion
Setting us free from the world.

Tristan goes one step further, giving way to an inherent longing for death:

Let me die!
...
Never to wake!

A perturbed Isolde draws Tristan’s attention back from his rapturous death wish to the unresolved problem of their fulfilment in love, pointing out the necessity for collusion rather than self-interest in any exit-plan he might be contemplating:

Day and Death
Would they not
With equal force attack our love?
...
But this our love,
Is it not called Tristan and Isolde?
This sweet little word “and”,
Binding as it does love’s union
...
How might it be destroyed
Other than with Isolde’s own life
If death were to be given to Tristan?

At which point Tristan proposes the idea of the Liebestod (death in love): an answer not only to Day's/Death’s obstacle to the lovers’ union but a solution as well to the problem of individuation that opposes oneness and unity with another:

Thus might we die undivided
One forever without end.
Never waking
Never fearing
Embraced namelessly in love
Given entirely to each other
Living only in our love!

Isolde agrees to follow Tristan into death; their love tryst becomes a promised death tryst into eternal, undivided oblivion:

Ardently desired death in love!
In your arms, devoted to you
Ever sacred glow, freed from the misery of waking.
...
Far from the day’s lamentations at parting!
...
Sublime drifting
Without languishing
Enfolded in sweet darkness
Without separating
Without parting
Dearly alone
Ever at one
In unbounded space
Most blessed of dreams!
...
No more Tristan
No more Isolde
No names, no parting!
Ever!
...
Unendingly, ever one consciousness:
Supreme joy of love
Glowing in our breast!

But the desire for eternal union, driven on a conscious level by the influence of the love potion the couple has accidentally drunk from and a belief in the enduring power of love, is no match for Tristan’s deeper desire: his inherent longing for death (a return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension, see Žižek 2002: 106). He cannot break away from its root. And in the final act, a wounded Tristan breaks the pact of the Liebestod: instead of waiting for Isolde to heal his wound so they might, as promised, surrender their lives together, he tears off his bandages and dies, alone, before her.

Nike Wagner’s devastating reading of the drama posits the love duet and the Liebestod as a cloak for the terrible truth that is revealed when Tristan breaks the pact of simultaneous death:

“...that even in love, every person is alone...that love is a projection of the self, a code-name for all sorts of other needs. Although we hold the romantic hope that we can submerge our ego in another person, this is ultimately a pious self-deception...one cannot escape from oneself...”

Cynical on the one hand, yet solace of sorts, she adds:

“[The music] helps to shield the audience from the terrible truth that is known to Tristan. Overwhelmed by the flood of the music, the spectator will no doubt reconstruct for himself the utopian unity of the lovers” (Wagner 1998: 83-84).

Slavoj Žižek offers a similar view:

“In Tristan, the ultimate truth does not reside in the musical message of passionate self-obliterating love-fulfilment but in the dramatic stage action itself, which subverts the passionate immersion into the musical texture. The final shared death of the two lovers abounds in Romantic operas...this is precisely not what effectively happens—in music, it is as if the two lovers die together, whereas in reality, they die one after the other, each immersed in his or her own solipsistic dream” (Žižek 2002: 123).

Lars von Trier is someone else who knows the terrible truth - making it (and the music from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) subject matter for his latest film, Melancholia.

A film about the end of the world, it’s also an intimate portrait of two tortured souls, sisters Justine and Claire, dealing with their respective personal crises. The call to individuation for Justine is sounded by her sense of doom and downward slide into depression. Claire’s consciousness is roused when all her previously held beliefs and props break down in the face of the impending destruction of the Earth and humanity’s inevitable demise.

Von Trier’s repeated use of the prelude from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde aptly underscores the sisters’ torment and the planet’s doom (though the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to agree with Alex Ross’s affront at von Trier’s relentless dwelling on the opening of the prelude that “turns [it] into a kind of cloying signature tune...[robbing] the music of its capacity to surprise and seduce the listener.” But then I, too, am guilty of relentlessly playing and replaying moments from the prelude, yet the music continues to seduce and astonish, so I’m also inclined to be forgiving).

As the collision of Earth with the planet Melancholia approaches, Justine reveals a double terrible truth – our essential and our cosmic aloneness:

Justine

The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it...Nobody will miss it...

Claire

There may be life somewhere else.

Justine

No, there isn’t.

Claire

How do you know?

Justine

Because I know things...I know we’re alone.... And when I say we’re alone...We’re alone.

I read Justine’s initial torment as agony over the fact of individuation and her gradual silence, calmness and dispassionate acceptance of the impending doom as relief from selfhood into oblivion.

The portrait of the two sisters is deeply moving and, as someone who normally doesn’t leave his negative energy behind, I am comfortable with the film’s “radical anti-anthropocentrism” (see Steven Shaviro). Von Trier’s vision of the end of the world was for me aesthetically and emotionally satisfying.

But it’s Tsai Ming-liang who most forlornly envisions the terrible truth – giving the lie to our seemingly unfilmable, invisible, internal feelings.

His early films (Rebels of the Neon God 1993 and Vive L’Amour 1994) centre on the inexorable loneliness of young, mesmerising, alienated, urban-dwellers and are fittingly described as “gorgeously glacial” (see Andrew Chan).

In the ironically but optimistically titled Vive L’Amour, three lonely strangers, May Lin, a real estate agent, Ah-jung, a street vendor and Hsiao-kang, a cremation urn salesman, come together accidentally in an unusual love triangle. The film’s moody tone is full of melancholy – the characters are deeply lonely and unhappy. The final scene showing May Lin walking alone through a desolate park and then sitting down at a bench and giving way to a fit of weeping is devastating. It has troubled me since I saw it. Chan is right to describe the final scene as “audacious”, though he dismisses it as a “ten-minute sob-fest that comes off scripted”. I can’t agree. There is in that deeply affecting (actually, six-minute) finale something that reveals the unrelenting truth of our essential aloneness.

Yang Kuei-Mei as May Lin in the final scene from Vive L'Amour

However, comedy is also a central element in the films of Tsai Ming-liang – in the characters themselves and in the chance encounters between them. Jared Rapfogel contends the comedy “lies in the way [Ming-liang] shows us what his characters cannot see – that though they may feel lonely, in fact they’re not nearly as separate as they think...Life is a comedy for Tsai because, from his point of view, people are so far from each other yet so close; they feel trapped in a bottomless solitude, while others crawl by inches away...a universe full of unfulfilled, often unconscious connections”.

The possibility this optimistic notion suggests - that our sense of isolation and despair may not necessarily (have to) be unshared – is something I would like to address in my next blog entry.

(NB the 1973 Böhm/Jourdan Theatre Antique d'Orange production of Tristan und Isolde remains my preferred production, however, I have quoted the English libretto from the 1983 Barenboim/Ponnelle Bayreuth production; the translation, in my opinion, is slightly better.)

dymo/stencil #035 - hermann hesse

2011-12-28T23:09:00.007+11:00

Hermann Hesse (with Jung close by) outside Allsorts Books in High St Northcote

1. Compulsion to flee

My inherent desire for separation (from the herd, from false communion) is stirring. Incomplete disentanglements and partings won’t do. I’m tempted but terrified by the thought of walking away completely. Regardless, I lack the actual courage to flee. My attempts at flight are condemned to remain imaginary dress rehearsals. How dull.

In the metropolis where Anselm was a teacher and had a high academic reputation, he went about behaving exactly like other people of the world...he was serious or genial as the occasion demanded...But...He suddenly felt as if many years had slipped past and left him standing strangely alone and unsatisfied with a way of life for which he had always longed. It was no real happiness to be a professor, it was not really gratifying to be respectfully greeted by citizens and students, it was all stale and commonplace. (Hermann Hesse, Iris, 1918)

Like Anselm, my mask suggests I’m always where I want to be. The truth is, I’m really always checking to make sure there’s an exit route.

I suspect I’m beginning to undergo individuation, defined by Jung as the process by which a person becomes a psychological individual, a separate indivisible unity or whole, recognising his/her innermost uniqueness...becoming one’s own self or self-realisation...distinguished from ego-centredness and individualism (Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion Vol. 2).

This process of psychological maturity, through a confrontation between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self, is considered to be natural, but not everyone responds to its call. After all, as Emil Sinclair perceptively asserts:

...nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself. (Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919)

On the other hand, the process of individuation may also be provoked by a (significant) change in one’s circumstances, a (profound) personal crisis or a (strong) desire to change direction. Having experienced all three lately, it’s probable that my desire for flight is really a call to a confrontation with the self. I’m no longer willing to simply identify with my persona.

According to Jung, the process, though painful, is meant to have a profound healing effect, leading to harmony through deeper self-awareness and greater acceptance of the self. But I’m sceptical that the quest-to-know leads anywhere other than a return to disenchantment and illusion. The ideas about the self inherent in Clarice Lispector’s work (influenced and inspired by Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf) are much more convincing: identity is an irreconcilable paradox; there is no recourse but to abandon the quest-to-know and return to the paralysing, false security of conventional wisdoms, structures and codes of conduct.

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t find the work of Hermann Hesse deeply satisfying. Hero to the tormented and disenchanted, his Jungian-influenced writing deals with the difficulties put in the way of the individual in his/her effort to build up an integrated, harmonious self. On a conscious level, I’m prone to utopian notions of unity – permitted, at least, in fiction – even if at a deeper level I subscribe more to the idea of the fractured and fragmented nature of reality.

I haven’t yet read Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game 1943, nor have I been inclined towards his work that deals specifically with quests-for-enlightenment/the mysticism of Eastern thought: Journey to the East 1932, Narcissus and Goldman 1930 and Siddhartha 1922. Starting instead with Steppenwolf 1927, I’ve worked my way backwards through Hesse’s work, moving on to Demian 1919 (his classic story of Jungian individuation), Klingsor's Last Summer 1920, Knulp 1915 and then on to his earliest work which I have responded to most: Rosshalde 1914, Gertrud 1910 and The Prodigy 1906 (probably because they deal with pre-individuated selves).

In Rosshalde, Hesse movingly conveys Johann Veraguth’s struggle for personal fulfilment. Veraguth is wealthy and successful in his work as an artist but has failed to confront his sense of alienation and unhappiness. Having allowed his consciousness to regress into a state of unknowing, Veraguth remains unindividuated and as a result is tormented by self-hatred and filled with hostility:

It was strange and sad, but no more strange and sad than all human destiny: this disciplined artist, who derived his power to work from the deepest truthfulness and from clear uncompromising concentrations, this same man in whose studio there was no place for whim or uncertainty, had been a dilettante in his life, a failure in his search for happiness, and he, who never sent a bungled drawing or painting out into the world, suffered deeply under the dark weight of innumerable bungled days and years, bungled attempts at love and life.

Of this he was not conscious. For years he had not felt the need to see his life clearly. (Chapter Eight)

A visit from an old friend from abroad stirs up buried emotions. Veraguth's sense of despair deepens and the call to individuation is sounded:

...his friend’s visit had shaken him up. Since then the lonely man had lived with a foreboding of danger and impending fate, of struggles and trials in which all his art and industry could not save him. In his damaged humanity he sensed a storm was in the offing and that he lacked the roots and inner strength to withstand it. (Chapter Eight)

Stifled by his unhappy marriage but devoted to his youngest son and his beautiful country estate, Veraguth must confront the painful truth of his inherent need for separation before he can be free to explore possibilities for self-realisation. Responding to the call of individuation, he emerges with the courage to leave his family and his home to travel to India to discover himself anew:

...he looked back over the short summer and discovered something that had been unknown to him only yesterday. Recalling the days of two or three months past, he found himself transformed; today he found clarity and a feeling of certainty as to the road ahead, where only a short time ago there had been only darkness and perplexity...Now it became clear to him that his journey could not possibly lead him back here, that there was nothing more for him to do here than take his leave, perhaps with a bleeding heart but no matter. His life was flowing again, driving resolutely towards freedom and the future. Though still unaware of it, he had inwardly renounced and cut himself off from the town and countryside, from Rosshalde and his wife. (Chapter Thirteen)

Hermann Hesse’s Rosshalde (like Grozdana Olujic’s I Vote for Love) ends with the bittersweet but thrilling promise of adventure and possibility of fulfilment for its hero:

[Veraguth] breathed deeply the moist, bitter-scented air of the park [at Rosshalde] and at every step it seemed to him that he was pushing away the past...His probing and his insight were without resignation; full of defiance and venturesome passion, he looked forward to the new life, which, he was resolved, would no longer be a groping or dim-sighted wandering but rather a bold, steep climb...(Chapter Eighteen)

But, for me, for now, it's vicarious flight into others’ battles with their subconscious through the remarkable work of Hermann Hesse – until I can rouse my own consciousness out of retreat, confront my own need for departure and book myself on the next flight (to Caracas).

dymo/stencil (sticker) #034 - helmut berger

2011-11-28T23:48:00.002+11:00

Helmut Berger as Ludwig II, High St, Northcote

The sad truth about my long break from spraying stencils is that I've been deriving my onanistic gratification instead from watching the films featuring Austrian-born German actor Helmut Berger who I inadvertently came across through my other distraction from blogging: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

In pursuit of fellow Tristanophiles, I read about Ludwig II of Bavaria who was an ardent patron of Richard Wagner.

One of Ludwig's first acts as King was to summon Wagner to Munich, providing him with the financial support to compose and stage his operas. Ludwig's increasing disinterest in his royal duties and neglect of his political responsibilities in favour of indulging his aesthetic satisfactions ultimately led to his withdrawal from public life and a forced abdication.

Ludwig’s frustration with social obligations, his inclination towards solitude and his solace in art make him an intriguing fellow traveller.

Eschewing traditional biographical/historical accounts, I started my Ludwig-related reading with You Higuri’s two-volume Yaoi manga Ludwig II and C. Robert Holloway’s novel My Letters from Ludwig. In hindsight, I should have started with Christopher McIntosh’s biography The Swan King and heeded his implicit warning that “much of the writing about [Ludwig] is of the same quality as the [kitschy] souvenirs: cheap, sentimental and crude." I would have been spared the disappointment to the point of ire at the (irreparable) damage done to Ludwig by both Higuri and Holloway.

Given my conviction that illustration has the power to evoke complex characters with psychological and emotional depth (e.g. Black Hole by Charles Burns and Ghost World by Daniel Clowes), I was looking forward to reading my first manga comic but anticipation turned to alarm when confronted with Higuri’s creepy, infantilised and fetishistic portraits of Ludwig and his equerry Richard Hornig:

Illustrations by You Higuri, Ludwig II, Vol.1

Higuri’s book is referred to as Yaoi or Boys’ Love – a type of manga focusing on homoerotic and homoromantic male relationships (curiously, written by and for women). I can see how the stereotypes on display might raise the ire of some but what puzzles me most is how anyone could find these kinds of images satisfying in any sense. On the whole, there is a vacuity in Higuri’s illustrations masked by an excess of romantic fantasy which renders them little more than fashion sketches on which to hang her kooky portrayal of Ludwig’s relationship with Hornig. One could justifiably feel indignant at this exploitation.

C. Robert Holloway commits an even more serious crime against the nonextant. Holloway is a character in his own(anistic) novel whose plot hinges on the revelation that Ludwig had been Richard Wagner’s sexual slave; the initial hilarity of this preposterous idea gives way to resentment as it becomes apparent Holloway’s graphomania is simply an excuse to record his uncensored fantasies, leaving one feeling soiled.

Christopher McIntosh’s ‘sober’ biography of the King restores a complex and balanced portrait of Ludwig, avoiding an overemphasis on his peculiarities/eccentricities. But I preferred Wilfrid Blunt’s ‘enthusiastic’ biography The Dream King which includes many wonderful photos and drawings and 'bizarre and unexpected details'.

I cringed in recognition at Blunt’s declaration:

“Ludwig was…the kind of concert- or opera-goer who is so despised by the professional musician: the listener who is content to let the music break over him like a wave and who cares nothing for codas, ‘second subjects’, and all the technical paraphernalia with which the average programme note is always so generously stuffed. ”

But it hasn’t prevented me from continuing to let the music of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde break over me.

McIntosh backs up Blunt:

“Often people with little previous knowledge of music or enthusiasm for it are nevertheless carried away when they come into contact with the powerful ethos and atmosphere of the Wagnerian world...It has also been claimed that Ludwig was one of these ‘non-musical’ Wagnerites. Indeed Wagner himself said that Ludwig had no real understanding of music.”

But then offers this consoling justification:

“...each of Wagner’s operas forms a totality [Gesamtkunstwerk], in which words, music and action are fused ...anyone who...respond[s] deeply must, given the nature of the work, respond to the whole. Thus when we talk about a ‘non-musical’ or ‘musically uneducated’ Wagnerite, what we really mean is someone in whom Wagner’s work has awakened a degree of musical response through the power of the totality.”

An awakening of a different kind and also the highlight of my preoccupation with Ludwig, however, has been the discovery of Helmut Berger who portrays the King in Luchino Visconti’s biopic. Unlike most reviewers of the film, I was undisturbed by the sympathetic portrayal of Ludwig – probably because I was leering. (So much for my indignation at the irreparable damage done to Ludwig by Higuri and Holloway.) Lecherous thoughts aside, Helmut Berger’s performance is riveting, forcefully conveying Ludwig’s dilemma between his public obligations and his personal ideals. As always, the Time Out Film Guide succinctly summarises the film’s shortcomings and its appeal:

“Nothing is more sumptuous than Helmut Berger's performance in the lead, the brooding mad scenes, the deliberately contrived hysterical outbursts, and it takes only a flicker of scepticism to find the whole charade risible. But suspension of disbelief has its own rewards: Visconti's connoisseurship of historical detail and manners is as acute as ever, and his commitment to his subject is total. The film was originally released in cut versions ranging between 186 and 137 minutes; this uncut one [235 minutes], obviously more coherent, simply doubles the interest/boredom rate.”

Links:

1. Select Helmut Berger filmography:

The Damned

Dorian Gray

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Ludwig

Conversation Piece

Faceless

2. Tumblr tribute: Fuck yeah, Helmut Berger!

3. Critical views of Yaoi – Boys’ Love manga

4. Essay by authoritative manga scholar Frederik L. Schodt who has made me rethink my position on manga. I might give it another go at some point.

dymo/sticker #001 - richard wagner

2011-07-19T22:10:00.009+10:00

Richard and Siegfried Wagner - father & son - outside the laundromat in High St, Northcote. Looking anything but awkward with one another in this photo, though there's plenty of dirt in this family history.

Difficult father-son relationships abound in literature.

The basis of Paul Morel’s troubled relationship with his father Walter in D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is Walter’s abhorrent behaviour: he is coarse, hard-drinking and abusive. Understandably, Paul harbours contempt for him. Yet, Walter is also affable and in places reveals a gentle side. When Paul is laid up with an attack of bronchitis, Walter checks in on him nightly in spite of Paul’s apparent unease and rejection:

On retiring to bed, the father would come into the sickroom. He was always very gentle if anyone were ill. But he disturbed the atmosphere for the boy.
‘Are ter asleep, my darlin’?’ Morel asked softly.
‘No; is my mother comin’?’
‘She’s just finishin’ foldin’ the clothes. Do you want anything?’ Morel rarely ‘thee’d’ his son.
‘I don’t want nothing. But how long will she be?’
‘Not long, my duckie.’
The father waited undecidedly on the hearthrug for a moment or two. He felt his son did not want him…
He loitered about indefinitely. The boy began to get feverish with irritation. His father’s presence seemed to aggravate all his sick impatience. At last Morel, after having stood looking at his son awhile, said softly:
‘Good-night, my darling.’
‘Good-night,’ Paul replied, turning round in relief to be alone. (Chapter IV)

Walter’s straightforward concern and tender enquiry after his son is touching. While I empathise with Paul’s antagonism, I can’t help but find Walter sympathetic.

In contrast, it is hard to have any sympathy for David Waring in Forrest Reid’s novel Following Darkness. The fraught relationship he has with his son Peter can be attributed to the distinct temperaments of father and son. Oblivious to Peter’s nature and his metaphysical concerns, David’s clueless parenting is instead driven by an anxiety over his son’s religious and moral life. Uneasy in his father’s presence in general, Peter is especially uncomfortable with his father’s puritanical views:

It was quite impossible for him to make me religious. For one thing, it was not in my nature. It was not so much that I disbelieved what I was taught of religion, as that these instructions aroused in me an implacable antagonism. I did not like the notion of an all-seeing God, for instance. Imperfectly grasped, this conception represented to my mind a kind of tyranny, a kind of espionage, which I strongly resented.

Peter’s inherent inexorability and resentment at a controlling scrutiny impels him to distance himself from his father’s influence towards a personal freedom and authenticity:

Very quickly I became more emancipated as I began to think things out for myself…

The practical ethics of religion, that I should simply be good and encourage in myself a variety of Christian virtues – that kind of thing did not interest me in the least. As a matter of fact, I possessed singularly few of these virtues. It is true that I detested any kind of meanness or cruelty, that I was truthful, straightforward, and, in certain directions, loving and gentle enough; but I was egotistical, proud, and ludicrously self-conscious, quick tempered, flying into violent passions for very little, and, above all, I had a stubbornness nothing could move. (Chapter II)

Perhaps in part because Reid was only interested in depicting boyhood and adolescence and not maturity and also because Reid understands that sometimes there’s just no fixing painfully awkward relationships, father and son ultimately remain estranged in his novel.

Thanks to a simple but fundamental agreement on religion (and a shared taste for VB), my own awkward relationship with my father has been spared total rupture. My father says there are two types of people in this world: those who believe in religion and smart people. We’re in complete agreement here. No doubt he would also be more sympathetic towards Walter Morel than to David Waring.

Where we part ways, however, is in our taste in music. My father has no time for vocal contortionists. To prevent any further uneasiness between us, I won’t reveal to him my recent interest in opera – or music drama more accurately, and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde specifically. I’m new to this type of music. Peter Waring’s response to his first opera and preference for the work of Wagner best describes my own:

I had become lost in this appealing melodrama…[the] music had an almost hypnotic effect upon me, for I had never heard it till now…It was all utterly new to me; it thrilled me…

I went to the opera every night that week…and save in the case of “Tannhäuser,” and of “Lohengrin,” I was disappointed. (Chapters XXIV & XXV).

Opera, it seems, is also replete with awkward father-son relationships. Apparently, there is a ceaseless recurrence of father-son conflicts in Wagner’s work (to look forward to). For the moment, I can only comment on Tristan und Isolde. In Act II, Scene III, King Marke discovers that his wife Isolde and his nephew Tristan have become lovers. The breach in the father/son-like relationship between Marke and Tristan is bitter. Unaware of the true cause of Tristan and Isolde’s all consuming love (the pair have accidentally drunk from the same love potion) Marke is bewildered by their betrayal. At the end of his reproach, Marke asks Tristan to account for his deceit:

Die kein Elend sühnt,
warum mir diese Schmach?
Den unerforschlich
furchtbar tief geheimnißvollen Grund,
wer macht der Welt ihn kund?

Why this dishonour
for which no misery can atone?
Who will make known to the world
the inscrutable, deep,
secret cause?

Tristan cannot answer him. Instead, the famous “Tristan Chord” fills the awkward silence. Paralleling Tristan’s agony of guilt and remorse, the music compensates for the insufficiency of language by communicating more clearly than words what Tristan cannot express. It is an astonishing piece of music – suggestive and richly textured:

The University of Texas notes and the The Met Opera notes are helpful here: “The first three measures of Tristan und Isolde presents one of the most famous openings in all of opera and contains the most talked about chord in all of music, a chord rich in content and at the same time ambiguous…[The chord] is actually two motifs. The first one, played by the cellos in the upper register, is known as the “Sorrow” or “Grief” [or “Longing”] motif:

Its continuation is played by the oboes, doubled by the English horn and supported harmonically by two clarinets and two bassoons. …This second motif is called “Desire”...The so-called “Tristan chord”, at the beginning of the second measure is a dissonant harmonic cluster, plunging the listener into an unstable, neurotic world…”

I came to Wagner’s opera indirectly after reading Gottfried von Strassburg’s compelling version of the story of Tristan and Isolde on which Wagner’s work itself is largely based. As a newcomer to this genre, I’m glad I followed the advice of Matthew Boyden in The Rough Guide to Opera and started with the 1973 Böhm/Jourdan Theatre Antique d'Orange production featuring John Vickers as Tristan and Birgit Nilsson as Isolde. Despite the lo-fi sound quality and the unsteady camera work, it’s an unforgettable experience. The amazing setting of the ancient Roman theatre, together with Vickers’ emotionally anguished interpretation of Tristan and Nilsson’s “steam whistle soprano” make up for the technical flaws.

This clip from Act II, Scene III at the end of King Marke’s reproach begins with the Tristan Chord. Tristan’s conflicting loyalty and overwhelming guilt eventually gives way to his death wish. Isolde agrees to follow him. What began at the opening of Act II as a lovers’ tryst ends with the pledge of a death tryst – the Liebestod which occurs at the end of the opera.

Wagner's music and Vickers’ performance floor me every time:

I’ve also got the 1983 Barenboim/Ponnelle Bayreuth and the 2007 Bělohlávek/Lehnhoff Glyndebourne productions to watch as well as the 1966 Böhm, 1952 Furtwängler and the 1972 von Karajan recordings I’m listening to. So it may be some time before I move on to Wagner’s other work. (But probably not as long as it would take me to get tickets to see a performance at Bayreuth – waiting time is between 5 and 10 years.)

dymo/stencil #033 - grozdana olujić

2011-04-20T10:36:00.002+10:00

Grozdana Olujić in High Street Thornbury

Grozdana Olujić’s novel Гласам за љубав (I Vote for Love) ends with Slobodan Galac’s thrilling declaration to his pet turtle:

– Држи се, Грета! – довикнав и скокнав на скалничката од еден вагон. – Ние патуваме!

“Hold on Greta!” [he] cried jumping onto the steps of the train carriage. “We’re heading off!”

Slobodan and Greta. Illustration by Simonida Filipova-Kitanovska

Slobodan, a sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield of the Balkans, shares his literary counterpart’s desire for authenticity and personal freedom (his name Slobodan means ‘free’). His decisive leap into adventure makes for a deeply satisfying ending to Olujić’s novel, contrasting sharply with Holden’s uncertainty and nostalgia at the end of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s not improbable to imagine Holden turning to pills. As for Slobodan, I’m not prepared to imagine anything less than success for him in his quest to reunite with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Rashida (forcibly sent away to Sarajevo by her father) and also in satisfying his wanderlust:

– Ќе ги достигнеме сите четири страни – Рашида, Грета и Јас...макар да се држиме со заби за ветрот.

“We’ll reach the four corners of the earth – Rashida, Greta and me…even if it means sailing into the wind.”

It’s normally during adolescence that we realise we don’t get to do everything we dream but for Slobodan, the world is still an illusion that must be shattered. I’m a sucker for earnest, introspective loners like Slobodan. Throw in some Romantic/Sturm und Drang qualities and I surrender totally. Needless to say, I won’t be projecting my cynicism onto his adolescent aspirations.

Olujić’s novel, published in 1963, is an early (some say pioneering) example in Serbian literature of ‘blue jeans prose’. The term was coined by literary theorist Aleksandar Flaker to describe a trend in youth fiction of the 60s and 70s modelled on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. ‘Blue jeans prose’ is characterised by an antagonistic protagonist, typically a teenager, who expresses him/herself in contemporary urban slang, rejects established norms and conventions and is opposed to the world of adults. Since the wearing of jeans was seen as a symbolic protest against conformity, the term aptly reflected the attitude of the protagonist. (Today we might refer to this type of fiction as ‘low-rise jeans prose’.)

Slobodan is a worthy icon for adolescent rebellion and angst. Like Holden, he rejects the hypocrisy of the adult world. Unlike Holden, Slobodan does not exhibit any of the qualities he disparages. Sublimating his sense of superfluity under a rebellious pose, Slobodan rejects a world in which qualities such as love and kindness are absent. His rejection is expressed symbolically in a school essay he writes opting for love:

...ако е возможно да се одбере, и ако човекот за било што гласа, јас гласам за љубов, иако и тоа е на некој начин загубена работа.

... if it is possible to choose, and if a person must vote for something, I vote for love, even if it is in some way a lost cause.

Early in the novel, Slobodan’s mother accuses him of negativity:

– Ти секогаш ги гледаш луѓето од најцрн можен агол!

“You always see people from the darkest side.”

What Slobodan sees are dissatisfied, disillusioned and unhappy adults who have succumbed to a provincial mentality. It’s his negativity and his strong desire to evade a similar fate that propels him towards flight. From a Hegelian point of view, self-identity without negativity signifies the death of being. The transformative potential of negative freedom (freedom from constraint) is the possibility it provides for self-awareness. As well as voting for love, Slobodan votes for self-determination.

Although some of Olujić’s work has been translated into over 28 languages, it appears that Гласам за љубав is only available in Serbian, Macedonian (Гласам за љубов) and German (Liebe ist wie ein frischer Apfel). In spite of the attraction of reading a text in its original and the aesthetic appeal of Cyrillic, it’s times like this I want to reconsider my decision not to do literary translation because it’s a book I believe should have wider exposure.

Fortunately, Olujić’s first novel Излет у небо (An Excursion to the Sky) is available in English translation. And it’s equally impressive. The bookflap summary should make it hard to resist:

Minya, the 22-year-old heroine…is cynical and disillusioned, convinced that life is nothing but a series of absurd incidents, relieved only by sporadic love affairs which she calls ‘excursions to the sky’. She is tired and indifferent…She wants to glide through life, peeling off the days as painlessly as possible, but she knows she is merely marking time, that the moment when she must face the truth about herself is not far off.

It’s available at AbeBooks.

Grozdana Olujić in High Street Thornbury

dymo/stencil #032 alain-fournier

2011-03-07T23:59:00.006+11:00

a wistful alain-fournier in brunswick street, fitzroy

Children’s literature has never really interested me much. In the toss up between reading C.S. Lewis at school and borrowing Harold Robbins from the local library, steamy bonkbusters beat children’s fantasy hands down. This might have had something to do with an early infancy in a home bereft of books but abounding in alcohol and pills. Attempting to redress the omission of classic children’s fiction from my childhood, I read Stevenson’s and Kipling’s adventure stories as an adult but they failed to provide any excitement or thrills. Perhaps childhood enchantment is a prerequisite for enjoying children’s fiction as an adult.

There is one exception: I still harbour an inappropriate fondness for Little Black Sambo. My first encounter at age six with this grand, little, fictional dandy made quite an impression. And what wonderful, considerate, sober parents he had! His mother made him a beautiful little Red Coat, and a pair of beautiful little Blue Trousers; his father went to the Bazaar and bought him a beautiful Green Umbrella, and a lovely little Pair of Purple (!) Shoes with Crimson Soles and Crimson Linings. I am not, however, unaware that my aesthetic development came at the expense of caricature.

Little Black Sambo, from the 1899 edition, illustrated by Helen Bannerman

Children’s books aside, there are a number of memorable literary children, including: Little Father Time, the intensely earnest, troubled young boy, devastated to the point of suicide in Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. His death and the suicide note he writes shattered me; similarly, in Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Hanno Buddenbrook’s premature death from typhoid fever was lamentable. This poor boy’s lack of vigour and his gradual withdrawal from life elicited my strong empathy; even more poignant is the depiction of Useppe in Elsa Morante’s novel History, set in Italy during WWII. Morante’s portrait of this five-year-old is unforgettably moving, particularly the evocation of his relationship with his pet dog. Sadly, Morante also bequeaths Useppe an early death; distinct from his counterparts, Luca, in Alberto Moravia’s Disobedience, emerges undefeated - however, not before undergoing an existential meltdown. Moravia’s minutely detailed description of Luca’s crisis is painful but it makes his return to life all that much more moving. Depictions of Sturm und Drang adolescence have always attracted me. Luca’s alienation and complete withdrawal from the world, his feelings of rage, disgust, nausea, apathy and indifference, leading to a revolt through nihilism and a death wish, are themes I continue to experience…oops!, explore …in my reading.

My devotion to literature began once I had emerged from the swamp of childhood and entered my own adolescent Sturm und Drang, starting with Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1912). Drawing on the themes of verse romance from the Middle Ages (the adventures of a heroic knight errant on a quest), Alain-Fournier’s elegiac novel, subtitled The Lost Domaine, uses a dream-like atmosphere to explore adolescent initiation and regret for lost love and vanished youth. François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship with Augustin Meaulnes who embodies the requisite Sturm und Drang qualities: he is dynamic, impulsive, and adventurous, with a great capacity for love and torment. One day, Meaulnes travels outside the village where he lives with François and ends up getting lost. While wandering, lost in the countryside, he comes across a party being held on a mysterious estate (domaine). There he meets a beautiful girl - his idealised love. Pledging devotion, he asks her permission to return to the domaine to see her. She accepts his request and promises to wait faithfully for his return. Meaulnes returns to the village and tells François about his adventure but his quest to recover the lost domaine and his lost love are frustrated by his inability to find his way back to the estate.

Is it sufficient to have read a favourite book once only?

Nostalgic for Alain-Fournier of late, I can’t decide whether or not to reread Le Grand Meaulnes. I’ve anticipated the time when I would reopen the covers of the novel to experience its (dis)enchantment anew (I have to agree with Alain-Fournier’s brother-in-law who said that at heart the novel is concerned with the sadness of adolescence). But I can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve taken it down from the shelf many times only to put it straight back. Suppose it doesn’t affect me in the same way as when I first read it? And how could it: isn’t youthful admiration always diluted by adult disillusionment?

First readings can be emotionally and intellectually satisfying experiences, allowing you to lose yourself in the story but at best they are incomplete interpretations. It is only with a second, self-conscious reading that it becomes possible to gain a greater critical appreciation of a text.

Endless Love by Scott Spencer is one book I enjoyed reading a second time. David Axelrod, the main character of Spencer’s novel, a modern version of Augustin Meaulnes, is a kindred Sturm and Drang adolescent: he is ardent, reckless and determined, with a capacity for all consuming love. His intense love for his girlfriend Jade is eventually met with parental opposition. Jade’s father forces a temporary break in their relationship. However, David’s obsession for Jade and his commitment to an ‘endless’ love for her, compels him to reckless means to regain her family’s favour and in turn his lost love. He sets fire to her family’s home in the hope of redeeming himself by ‘saving’ the house from burning down. However, like his love, the fire burns out of control. A stint in prison does not diminish his feelings, begun in adolescence, towards Jade. Once released, he continues pursuing her with tragic consequences. David’s capacity for all consuming love is inspiring and pitiable; his unwavering constancy admirable but untenable; and his inability to get over Jade is tragic because it is destructive. In his introduction (which I have read) to a new translation of Alain-Fournier’s novel (which I won’t read), Adam Gopnik invites us to compare David Axelrod with Augustin Meaulnes in order to foreground the succession of literary teenagers undone by their refusal to make the painful transition from adolescence to adulthood – a refusal-to-age.

(It would be otiose to add that these torch bearing, melancholy loners, whose part in life it is always to regret, have had a lasting impression on me.)

But back to my dilemma…is my refusal-to-reread a refusal-to-age? I'm not prepared to risk my first fictional romance on a rereading. It's my defence against adulterating (how damningly accurate that word is!) my memory of the novel. Perhaps the enchantment is the memory itself and it’s simply best to prolong the desire to reread in order to retain the memory. Fulfilment is often disappointing.

I've put Le Grand Meaulnes back on the shelf and will instead read some of the books that Alain-Fournier admired and that inspired his writing:

Dominique by Eugene Fromentin

The Romance of Tristan and Yseult by Joseph Bedier

Pelleas et Melisande by Maurice Maeterlinck

It's a shame I won't be able to buy them from Basilisk bookstore which sadly closed last week. This is one lost book domaine I won't get over.

photo by fitzroyalty

dymo/frame up #002 - kate lawrence

2011-01-25T23:48:00.004+11:00

kate lawrence, high street, northcote

Summer’s a good time to get through some of the towering stacks of unread books piling up around the house. I finally got round to reading Granta #37 (published in 1991). Focusing on The Family and aptly subtitled: they fuck you up, I started reading it after my family Christmas, taking solace in confirming the generally destructive tendency of the family from the collection of (now not so) new writing.

The subtitle is taken from a poem by Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Unperturbed by this image of the family (coming, as I do, from one that is lacking in solicitude and inclined to the usual lies and self-deceptions practised by family members), I prepared to settle down to familiar stories of dysfunction, suffering and damage.

Most of the stories (and photographs) in the collection are indeed confronting – disturbing even, but they are also genuinely gripping depictions of the family. The first three make for especially difficult reading: Family Album, Mikal Gilmore’s memoir of his violent family and notorious brother Gary Gilmore, later executed for his crimes; selections from the Journals and Letters of Sappho Durrell, daughter of the writer Lawrence Durrell with whom she had an intense love/hate relationship and who later committed suicide; and Field Burning, William Wharton’s account of an entire family killed in a car accident as a result of field burning (burning off) based on the loss of his own daughter, her husband and their two children in such an incident.

Lighter in tone, Mona Simpson’s story, Ramadan, a wry, bittersweet account of a daughter’s search for her absent father, is also impressive. Meeting her grandmother briefly for the first time, she poignantly reflects:

“I was sad over how many different lives there were and we only got once.”

A reminder of the arbitrariness of the family we end up in and that we only get one turn.

Geoffrey Wolff’s contribution, Waterway, dubiously described as a story about “the bliss of a family properly on course” (!?), is the least impressive contribution in the collection. As a story recounting a harrowing boat trip, it’s harrowingly dull. As a metaphor for acceptance (a father realises that he’s had his day in the sun and that it’s time to hand over the keys [of the boat] to his son to steer his own course through life) it’s unconvincing. (Beware of parents bearing boat keys! Paul Bowles had the right idea – wisely fleeing his family [by boat!] at age 18). In the end, Waterway is really Geoffrey Wolff’s chance to paint his own portrait as the benign, benevolent and trusting parent. Had the circumstances of the story been inverted (a harrowing family life in which the father is reluctant to give up control and a smooth, uneventful boat trip), it would have been more in keeping with Larkin’s idea of the family and might have been a more convincing family portrait.

But I digress…

Summer’s also a good time to watch some classic TV on DVD. This summer I re-watched seasons one and two of Family which originally aired in 1976/1977. Made at a time when television executives had not yet begun to infantilise adults or teens, it is a sophisticated, well-written and well-acted series. A serious (melo) drama with a conscience, the show tackled sensitive issues such as abortion, adoption, alcoholism, teen sex and homosexuality.

Kate Lawrence, the humble homemaker and marvellous matriarch at the centre of the series (played consummately by Sada Thompson), makes her appearance in the pilot episode cleaning the garbage bin – an unflattering debut, perhaps, but appropriate as a metaphor that establishes her willingness to confront the inevitable family garbage – even that of her own making.

No sooner does she finish cleaning the bin, than she makes a mess of her relationship with her youngest daughter ‘Buddy’ who overhears Kate confessing to husband Doug to almost having aborted Buddy:

Kate

If I got rid of a baby every time I thought I didn’t want it, we wouldn’t have much of a family.

Doug

You don’t mean that.

Kate

Don’t presume to tell me what I mean. I’m 46 years old and I’ve borne three children. Some of the time of those pregnancies, I wanted out. It’s the body that makes the baby and hangs on to it for nine months. Why can’t men understand sometimes women just want out! My god, when I found out I was pregnant with Buddy, I even got as far as tracking down an abortionist.

Buddy storms off and doesn’t hear Kate finish:

Kate

Why can’t you understand? Eventually I wanted all of them. Now, I can’t imagine life without them. But sometimes, sometimes, just for a minute, I didn’t.

Kate handles the reconciliation beautifully. Instead of serving up the Babies Make Everything Better in the End trope, she opts for candid confirmation of her ambivalence towards becoming a mother. Her forthrightness about the lows of being pregnant and having children and her healthy sense of perspective is admirable. Kate’s unwillingness to mythologise her children (The Baby Trap) and her tendency to bluntness may make her appear remote but we don’t doubt for a moment her enviably convincing, ingenuous loyalty and commitment to her family.

Buddy’s got nothing to fear. Kate’s not going to fuck her up. She’s got far too much insight and integrity to do that. It’s a restrained and moving reunion:

The memorable opening credits of Family feature Kate passing framed family photographs on the piano. Her sober, earnest nature is underscored by her serious mien, her no-nonsense cardigan and the subdued, sombre accompanying musical theme.

still of Kate from season 1 opening credits

However, the producers of the show must have expressed concern that Kate appeared too severe and were perhaps worried that viewers would think the show was about chronically upset, depressed people, full of angst because from season two onwards, the opening credits show Kate taking off her cardigan and folding it casually over her arm before walking past the photographs. This more relaxed attitude is accentuated by the hint of a smile and a new, upbeat, less strained (but less appealing) musical theme.

still of Kate from season 2 opening credits

My framed stencil portrait tribute of Kate Lawrence is called:

Portrait of a Woman of Integrity.

Links:

Sneak peak at Family - Season 4, Episode 14 – Disco Queen: Buddy sneaks into a disco club, with the help of an older acquaintance, and finds it more than she bargained for (a must see episode for the “Woo, Woo!” chanting disco dancers).

Granta Magazine (currently at issue #113) is available here.

dymo/stencil #031 - antónio lobo antunes

2010-12-21T12:04:00.010+11:00

antónio lobo antunes in lygon st, brunswick east

"For reasons I won't go into right now, the last few difficult weeks have forced me to think about the past and the present and to forget about the future...Especially the past because the future is getting narrower and narrower and I say especially the past because the present has become the past too, memories that I thought were lost and that return without my realising they were lost..." António Lobo Antunes, 'Before Darkness Falls', (2009, tr. M. J. Costa The Fat Man and Infinity)

Assailed of late by flashbacks from episodes in my past (which I won't go into right now), I’ve had to make room in my internal monologue for competing voices that I’ve found hard to turn off or down.

Unlike Proust’s magical madeleine inspired memories, my own flashbacks have been more like the fraught, telekinetic visions of Amy Irving’s character Gillian in Brian De Palma’s film The Fury.

Still from the staircase sequence in Brian De Palma's The Fury, 1978

In a brilliantly conceived and breathtaking sequence, De Palma has Gillian flash back on the staircase to Andrew Steven’s character Robin being chased up the stairs and falling out a window. De Palma’s dizzying, 360-degree camera pan of the flashback, orbiting Gillian on every side, helps convey the disorienting temporal dislocation that has Irving’s character in the middle of a past event in the present moment. It also heightens the sense of psychological torment that threatens to unhinge the troubled Gillian.

I experienced a similarly unnerving flashback recently (inconveniently, while driving – not the safest time to suffer a temporal rupture) that generated a medley of voices crowding in on my stream of consciousness. It was disquieting to be engulfed by a vision from the past and hearing all those long gone voices.

“We are never where we are, don’t believe it, not even now, as we ride in this small elevator…At this moment you, my friend, are probably nude on the beach last August…; at this moment I might be in Angola as I was eight years ago…” António Lobo Antunes, Os Cus de Judas (1979, tr. E. Lowe, South of Nowhere).

"I want my grandmother alive...I want everything that I allowed to slip away and that I need...I want to have time to get up the courage to tell my parents that I love them very much (I don't know if I can) to tell my parents that I love them very much before darkness falls, ladies and gentlemen, before the final darkness falls." António Lobo Antunes, 'Before Darkness Falls', (2009 tr. M. J. Costa, The Fat Man and Infinity)

Unsure quite what to make of my own flashbacks, I turned to the work of António Lobo Antunes whose treatment of multiple narrative and temporal strands has, in his most recent work, sought to deal with autobiographical elements. His ability to render in writing the melee inside our heads, giving it a structure and shape, is impressive.

Eu hei-de amar uma pedra (2005, I Shall Love a Stone), his seventeenth and most recent novel (said also to be his most autobiographic work) is like much of his writing, an exploration of past events and experience. The protagonist's present feelings are mixed up with recollections from his past: the neighbourhood of his childhood; the difficult relationship he had with his indifferent parents; his love for his first wife and two daughters. His memories are triggered by old photographs and fragments of remembered conversations but also by the parallel events of the lives narrated by the people around him.

But it is the love story, based on a patient in the hospital where the author had worked as a psychiatrist, that is the central story of the novel and that adds a further narrative strand evoking memories of the protagonist's own relationships. Lobo Antunes has described the novel as a love story, explaining in an interview how the story he heard from the patient inspired his novel:

“In hospital, I examined a poor, peasant woman aged about eighty. At 16, she had fallen in love with a boy from the village. He would stand outside her window all the time. At 17 the girl fell ill and was hospitalised in Coimbra where she received letters from him. However, she did not respond for fear of infecting him. Receiving no answer, the boy abandoned her. He ended up marrying and having children. Ten years later they met again in Lisbon. They began to meet every Wednesday night in a hostel between three and six in the evening – this took place for 53 years! The man died at the hostel in the company of his lover. To avoid scandal, the family of the man arranged for the body to be removed. His lover did not attend the funeral or the memorial service. She became depressed and was hospitalised where I examined her and whose story gave me the idea for a novel.”

The multiple points of view in the novel, in which past and present merge in a constant stream of thought, makes for a complex prose style. (Doubly so in my case: the novel has yet to be translated into English and I had to read the Spanish language version). Maintaining a grasp on the frequent shifts in time, place and voices was difficult but rewarding.

Like De Palma’s dizzying but gripping 360-degree pan that surrounds Gillian in The Fury, if you persist with it, Lobo Antunes’s lyrical story eventually wraps itself around you taking possession. The apparent chaos of the novel, with its seemingly disparate and disconnected parts and chapters, is in the end revealed to be consistently structured by the vast collection of memory fragments that are reiterated page by page, chapter by chapter.

Virgina Woolf, who also uses the stream of consciousness to great effect in her writing, especially in Mrs Dalloway, remarked that when perfected, the technique should “make us feel ourselves seated at the centre of another mind”. I think Lobo Antunes achieves this in his work and for me of late, it’s been far more satisfying seated inside the interior monologue of his world than my own.

Highly recommended work by António Lobo Antunes (available in English translation):

The Fat Man and Infinity, a collection of chronicles (personal essays and reminiscences), is a good place to start and to approach his prose style.

Os Cus de Judas (1979, tr. E. Lowe, South of Nowhere). But it’s probably worth waiting for the new translation by Margaret Jull Costa to be called The Land at the End of the World due out in May 2011.

(Read also Isabel Moutinhou’s valuable study of the novel.)

Conhecimento do Inferno (1980, tr. C. E. Landers, Knowledge of Hell)

Que Farei Quando Tudo Arde? (2001, tr. G. Rabassa, What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?)

I’m glad I persevered with the Spanish language translation of Eu hei-de amar uma pedra but I hope it gets translated into English one day. The original Portuguese version is available online.

Highly recommended sequence from The Fury (partially revealed in the film trailer):

De Palma’s 360-degree camera pan could be used to great effect to dramatise the past in the present in a would be film version of Lobo Antunes’s poetic stream of consciousness novel.

Until such time, watch Alain Resnais’s attempts to represent stream of consciousness in two of his films: Hiroshima mon amour, which makes use of brief flashbacks intercutting the scenes to suggest a brief flash of memory and Muriel, which explores the challenge of integrating a remembered or imagined past with the life of the present.

(kindertrauma’s review of Brian De Palma’s The Fury may be of interest, too.)

dymo/stencil #030 - miss kittin

2010-11-23T11:11:00.002+11:00

(bye, bye) miss kittin, lygon st, brunswick east

(sadly gone now, up for only 12 hours!)

Frank Sinatra is the standout track on Miss Kittin & The Hacker’s phenomenal First Album. It’s a sardonic reflection on the superficial world of celebrity and in a way, the musical equivalent of the wry satire of Bret Easton Ellis’s writing, particularly his novel Glamorama, itself a serious hatchet job on celebrity culture.

Miss Kittin cites Ellis as an influence; the lyrics of Frank Sinatra reflecting the characters and the main themes of his novel. In her signature Sprechgesang satirical tones, Miss Kittin dissects with stylish precision the banality and vapidity at the heart of celebrity culture:

Every night with my star friends
We eat caviar and drink champagne
Sniffing in the VIP area
We talk about Frank Sinatra…
To be famous is so nice
Suck my dick
Lick my ass
In limousines we have sex
Every night with my famous friends
Nice...
You know Frank Sinatra?
He's dead!
HAHAHAHAHA!
Dead!

It would be perfect as the theme song for the film version of Glamorama – if Roger Avary has a change of heart and decides to release it. (Take note, Roger: we don’t mind if the film is ethically questionable!) Ellis’s novel, a hilarious satire, similarly exposes celebrity culture’s denizens and proponents as self-obsessed, drug and alcohol fuelled, name dropping, derisive and permissive sociopaths whose main concern with appearances and their stunning lack of insight often horrifies. Here’s a startling exchange between the main character Victor and his business partner Damien discussing the death of the DJ they had employed to open their new club:

“Victor, she’s dead…She was found in a dumpster…she was beaten with a hammer and …eviscerated.”
I’m taking this in with a large amount of extreme calm. “She OD’d?”
“No…She was eviscerated, Victor.”
“Oh my god,” I gasp, holding my head, and then, “What does eviscerated mean?”
“It means she didn’t die a peaceful death.”
“Well, yeah, but how do we know that?”
“She was strangled with her own intestines.”
“Right, right.”
(Glamorama, 1998, 170)

Expressing ideas that have a ring of truth can be vexing. But with impressive, unsparing style, both Ellis and Miss Kittin get the tone right and come close. Ellis’s minimalist and dispassionate prose and Miss Kittin’s deadpan delivery, drained of any misleading tones, approximate to the general feeling of emptiness, absurdity, and alienation that characterises much of modern life.

I prefer Miss Kittin’s collaborations to her solo work, including: Stripper with The Hacker – another damn fine derisive track from this duo; Rippin Kittin with Golden Boy – a seminal, dark, irresistible dance track; and Röyskopp’s delectable remix of What Does it Feel Like? with Felix Da Housecat – brilliantly utilising the bland vocals of Miss Kittin and Melistar to deliver a lush, dreamy, funky dance track.

Some of her solo work is good, too. Pollution of the Mind, an infectious anthem for misanthropes, neatly deals with a variety of modern complexes that produce angst (and not strictly for celebrities – the angst expressed here could easily apply to public transport users in Melbourne):

People speak small talk
Flesh too close in airports (trams/trains)
Strangers you get on my nerves
Eyes staring at me
Faces looking unhappy
Headaches non-stop guarantee

Walking in bad smell
Sleeping in noisy hotels (travelling in noisy trams/trains)
Please, take a shower of silence

But at heart, the song is an expression of gratitude to friends:

Friends clean your brain
Sun can shine again

However, if friendships should go awry, Miss Kittin and Bret Easton Ellis are there to help us.

Links:

Read David Raposa’s spot on review of Miss Kittin & The Hacker’s collaborations.

Aspects of Glamorama are discussed by Steven Shaviro in his outstanding critiques of two of Ellis’ other novels, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms.

More idols for the caustic and the cynical to dance to:
Ladytron; Peaches; Tiga (who has also produced a great remix of Madame Hollywood – Mister Hollywood) and Chicks on Speed.

dymo/stencil #029 - bret easton ellis

2010-10-24T23:21:00.004+11:00

(bret easton ellis in lygon st, brunswick east)

in company with brian castro - refer to previous post

dymo/stencil #028 - brian castro

2010-10-24T23:20:00.017+11:00

(brian castro, in company with bret easton ellis, lygon st, brunswick east)

(bret & brian - two of my 'idyls' in brunswick east)

An acquaintance once pointedly implied that textual maturity arrives when one has moved on from the novels of one’s youth (especially those featuring self-indulgent, mordant, angst-ridden, brooding protagonists with a keen sense of the absurdity of life) in favour of seasoned auto/biographies and histories. I resented the implication of fiction’s inferiority to writing about real lives/events and its incompatibility with adult tastes.

Problematic, too, was the implicit notion that novels are distinct from auto/biographies and histories by being fictional. After all, the slippery, unreliable nature of autobiography means that elements of fiction in this type of writing are unavoidable: what goes in? what’s left out? what about faulty memory? how much is invented to make up for what cannot be remembered? and how much is glossed over to avoid mention of disagreeable facts/events?

Autobiographies may be largely fictional while novels may in part be autobiographical.

Incidentally, this distinction does not sit comfortably with Bret Easton Ellis or Brian Castro, either.

There is much to admire in the work of these two writers. Although their prose styles are different (Ellis’s glib, minimalist style contrasting sharply with Castro’s rich, discursive prose), their writing is similarly playful and provocative, as well as intelligent and witty.

Ellis’s faux-memoir Lunar Park (2005) and Castro’s fictional autobiography Shanghai Dancing (2003) are connected by similarly disrupting notions of fiction and autobiography (and also by the trope of sons being haunted by the ghosts of their dead fathers).

Lunar Park begins as a wry autobiography containing what appears to be a reliable/verifiable account of Ellis’s personal life and career to date but it soon becomes apparent that, although convincing, some personal information just doesn’t ring true: Bret was never married (was he?) and he never had kids (did he?). What's more, the surreal elements in the novel, including a maniacal toy bird that attacks Ellis, characters from his former novels coming to life and the haunting ghost of his dead father, add to the confusion of fact with fantasy, transgressing the rules of conventional autobiography.

Timothy Baker (2009, p.497) argues that “[w]hat makes Lunar Park so uncomfortable to read is that the reader expects autobiographies to separate reality and illusion more clearly than novels, but in this case the two become indistinguishable nevertheless.”

I agree. The myth of the reliability of autobiography is powerful. Tampering with the form can induce trauma in some readers. Even so, I would suggest that rather than making for an uncomfortable experience, Ellis’s blending/blurring of fact and fiction, presenting a “hyperreal world…distorted and enhanced” (Baker 2009, p.487) in order to question the relationship between fiction and reality, makes this highly original novel an intriguing, challenging and ultimately engaging read. Furthermore, Lunar Park is a good example of what Enrique Vila-Matas describes as “a stimulating tendency of the contemporary novel that opens new ground between essay, fiction and autobiography” (Montano’s Malady 2007, p.135).

This tendency also applies to the work of Brian Castro, who in my view is one of the few contemporary writers in Australia to continually invigorate the novel. Sneja Gunew (2005, p.371) believes that Castro is a difficult writer to categorise, positing a “porosity between the categories of autobiography, the personal essay, and theory” in his work. Castro himself is keenly aware of the power of categorisation:

Let me give you some examples of the power of genre and categorisation. My novels Birds of Passage and Double-Wolf are frequently found in certain bookshops under the category of Wildlife and Nature. They are never sold there. My novel After China once appeared on the Travel shelves, and did quite well. (Auto/Biography 1996, p.105)

Shanghai Dancing, Castro’s seventh novel, continues his preoccupation with autobiography. Narrated by Antonio Castro (“the brother I never had”), it is loosely based on his family’s life in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau from the 1930s to the 1960s. Drawing on memory, history, stories, photos, and family myths and secrets, Castro rejects the limiting tropes of autobiography, playfully blending, “distorting and enhancing” a variety of sources to tell his vividly imagined family history. Castro describes the novel as a ‘fictional autobiography’, inviting us from the outset to relax our notions of what autobiography should or should not do. As Antonio stumbles/dances his way through Shanghai narrating the family stories, we are invited metaphorically to dance along – following his lead not in order to determine facts from fiction but to be dazzled by his seductive narrative. And what a wonderful dance it is!

In his earlier collection of essays Looking for Estrellita (1999), Castro foreshadows and explains his genre-transgressing aims:

One winter not so long ago, I began to write what I called an ‘autobiography’…I wasn’t making any claims about truth and lies and real events. I knew the word autobiography carried a freight of meaning it didn’t really deserve: real life; true stories; family secrets. Writing, of course, makes oxymorons of these. I knew all autobiographies were highly inventive acts of dissimulation which sometimes had real or unfortunate consequences. I knew the public reaction to autobiography was one of overlooking its fabrication. Then why not write a novel instead? A novel usually only risks one thing: its form…An ‘autobiography’ however, does make some claims. Claims about oneself, one’s family, lineage, history. (Dangerous Dancing 1999, p.205)

Bernadette Brennan (2008, p.152) argues that writing “autobiography that undermines accepted boundaries of family, society, and nationhood, and which shows equal regard for ‘fact’ and fiction is more transgressive, more unsettling, and more intellectually satisfying for Castro [and for the reader!] than writing a novel. Castro…is drawn to the ‘auto/biographical form’, because it is ‘unstable in itself’ and because it ‘has the potential to transgress the furthest.’”

I think textual maturity comes when readers risk openness to new forms of writing and new ways of reading texts. Limiting your reading to certain genres and dismissing fiction means missing out on the stimulating and intellectually satisfying work of writers such as Ellis and Castro, both of whom assuredly appeal to mature tastes.

Links:
Read two favourable reviews of Shanghai Dancing: one in The Asian Review of Books, the other in The Age.

For two favourable reviews of Lunar Park, read Steven Shaviro’s critique at his (excellent) blog The Pinnochio Theory & Meghan O’Rourke’s review at Slate.com

For a less favourable review that puts forward strong arguments against Lunar Park (but with which in the end I disagree), read what Joey Rubin thought at Bookslut.com

Finally, some recommendations of other favourite novels that blur the boundary between essay, fiction and autobiography:

Exploradores del abismo & Dietario voluble by Enrique Vila-Matas (who happens to be dymo/stencil #013)

La loca de la casa by Rosa Montero (stencil forthcoming)

Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald (stencil also forthcoming)

Shoplifting from American Apparel and Richard Yates by Tao Lin (probably won’t be doing a stencil of him)

Little Me by Patrick Dennis (will do a stencil only if I decide to revisit his work)

dymo/stencil #027 - laura webber

2010-10-04T22:46:00.013+11:00

(not in General Hospital but outside a medical practice in St Georges Rd Northcote)

A decade before “radiant on the surface, dying on the inside” Laura Palmer, the 17-year-old high school prom queen found murdered in the pilot episode of David Lynch’s engrossing 1990 series Twin Peaks, there was radiant on the surface, dying on the outside Laura Webber, the immensely popular 17-year-old character and equally troubled teen victim of sexual violence from soap opera General Hospital.

Forced to reveal:

Twin Peaks was driven by the question: who killed Laura Palmer? Although not his original intent, David Lynch was forced by television executives to reveal the murderer in order to quell fans’ anger and annoyance at the series taking too long to reveal the killer. Ironically, once the murderer was revealed, enthusiasm for the show waned and the series was cancelled.

Forced to conceal:

In 1979/1980 General Hospital was driven by the question: was it rape? Convinced he’d soon be killed in mob activity, Campus Disco manger Luke Spencer forces Laura Webber Baldwin (married four months earlier to Scotty Baldwin) to dance with him one evening (to the pulsating music of Herb Alpert’s Rise) in his deserted disco (Laura was working there as a waitress to help pay back a loan she’d made from Luke to buy a set of law books for Scotty). While dancing, Luke pushes Laura to the floor and rapes her. Crying in fear and humiliation, Laura screams ‘No!’ repeatedly before the fade out. It is a chilling and disturbing scene...More disturbing, though, is the direction the story took after the rape. The original storyline, in which Laura gives a gut-wrenchingly painful performance as a rape victim, changed once television executives realised the onscreen chemistry between Laura and anti-hero Luke. As his popularity increased, television executives were not about to send Luke to therapy or jail. Instead, the rape was rewritten as a 'seduction' or, to use a more apt TV trope, it was ‘ret conned’. With the mob in pursuit, Luke and Laura are thrown into a series of on-the-run stories, falling in love between death threats. Once enough time had elapsed for the ‘ret con’ to be accepted (a little over two years), the wildly popular ‘super couple’ were married. Their wedding in 1981 was apparently the highest rated hour in soap opera history. (Elizabeth Taylor requested and was given a role in the show and Princess Diana sent champagne.)

Sussezq’s YouTube channel provides us with the opportunity to (re-)watch (in pre-HD/lo-fi glory!) the controversial 1979/1980 storyline focusing on Laura and Luke. (It’s still compelling.) Sussezq’s uploads have been edited to omit all but the scenes including Laura and Luke. This intense focus makes for a darker and more disturbing retelling of the story. Every scene pertains to the rape or focuses on the other sordid goings-on involving the mob. There is no relief from the torment and grief. The tight, silent movie-style close up camera shots are penetrating, zooming in for maximum character expression (mostly tortured), at the same time effectively eliminating the bad sets from view.

(typical close up of a perpetually tormented Laura in 1979/1980)

(And while I'm on the topic of sets, the central setting of the storyline at the Campus Disco provides occasional relief from the dramarama. The tacky set looks trashily good - by day it is used as a venue for exercise classes run by Richard Simmons (!); by night, it’s pumping out classic disco tracks, including: France Joli’s Come to Me; Sister Sledge’s Good Times; Evelyn Champagne King’s Shame and The B52’s Planet Claire (!). The finger-snapping, hand waving, jazz ballet-style, disco dancing extras are a real hoot, too, especially when they break the first rule of Things to Avoid on the Dance Floor:

1. Don't clap, point, snap or start the disco train. The party has started. It doesn't need your help. In general, you're trying to blend in, not draw attention to yourself by shouting out the lyrics to songs or starting dance battles.

Note, too, the spooky similarity in the décor of the Campus Disco in General Hospital (left) and the Red Room in Twin Peaks (right) in these stills:)

Martha Nochimson’s (1993) analysis of Laura’s rape storyline in General Hospital reads as a disturbing acceptance of the rape-as-seduction ‘ret con’:

“The so-called rape…was not a rape at all, since it was almost completely free from association with dominance-subordination eroticism.”

Furthermore, Nochimson views the ‘seduction’ as a means for Laura to accept her own sexuality. Referring to the dance Luke forces Laura to have with him before raping her, Nochimson argues:

“…what this scene, both narratively and visually impresses on the viewer most strongly is Laura’s struggle with her own desire, and with her fear of shedding conventional limits…Laura’s dancing renders her a spectacle…In stimulating Laura’s narcissism, the dance brings out her own sense of her sexuality, as well as Luke’s…”

I’m not convinced. Watching Laura scream ‘No!’ repeatedly as Luke forces her down on the floor, it did not occur to me that she was merely struggling with her sexuality. Karen Lindsey’s (1993) review of Nochimson’s argument sums it up nicely: “This is pretty scary stuff.”

Andrew Goodwin (1990) suggests that, because of its serial form and its simultaneous transmission, television sometimes has an emotional power unmatched by cinema. I would agree. Soap opera’s serial format and its use of story arcs that unfold over a longer timeframe, seemingly in real-time, provide better possibilities than movies to establish an intimacy with the characters and their stories. In General Hospital, a sustained involvement in Laura’s torment and her attempt to come to terms with what happened to her, which is troubling and convincing, enables us to emotionally identify with her. And this is what soap is all about: involvement and identification. (Warning! This kind of involvement comes at a serious cost - refer to the Fiction Depersonalization Syndrome link at end of this post.)

Twin Peaks draws much of its character development from soap opera and the serial format allows for a more intimate treatment of the psychological devastation of violence, leaving us with a greater impact of its effects. The portrayal of violence against women in the series is terrifying (Leo’s verbal/physical abuse of Shelly), shocking (Leland’s killing of Maddy) and horrific (rape of Laura by her father). Responding to criticism of images of violence against women in Twin Peaks, Goodwin (1990) poses these thoughtful questions:

Isn't this identification (the triumph of soap, of the serial, of the TV audience) important precisely because identifying with the horror of violence and abuse is the first step towards educating people about it? Are we so dumb as to believe that all representations endorse what they show? And if – as some critics have suggested – soap narratives are gendered through the link between their multiple climaxes and female sexuality, don't we also think that constant reiteration and discovery of _questions_ might have something to do with how women talk, not through bold statements, but through tentative inquiry?

Karen Lindsey (1993) thinks that Laura’s rape storyline, without condemnation, was one of the lowest moments in soap opera history. Thirty years on (!) General Hospital does not disappoint. Eschewing traditional soap opera elements and the genre’s compensatory function in favour of darker, gloomier, schadenfreude-satisfying storylines, it continues to serve up compelling bad taste moments. Current stories focus on: mobsters and molls, hit men, excessive shoot outs, murders, prison rape, child exploitation, teen verbal/physical assault, hit and runs and car bombs. It also provides examples of these other choice television tropes: Bloodstained Glass Windows; Hitman with a Heart and Villainous Crossdresser. (Even more tropes here.)

Strictly for fans:

General Hospital the most violent show on television (and why James Franco would agree to be on it)

Is General Hospital going to Oz?

A link to David Zweig’s troubling Fiction Depersonalization Syndrome which does not bode well for sustained TV (soap) watching. (Perhaps I won’t read it.)

A link to Martha Nochimson's (seemingly favourably received) book on the films of David Lynch (which I have yet to read).

dymo/frame up #001 - david lynch

2010-09-21T22:57:00.007+10:00

(david lynch stencil / laura palmer & john merrick paste up - framed and hanging near a favourite haunt, Lygon Street, Brunswick East)

David Lynch describes his films as “film-paintings – moving portraits captured on celluloid” and his visual style has been referred to as “framed pictures”.

Framed photographs have an important significance in his work, particularly in two of my favourites: Twin Peaks (1990), the television series he co-created with Mark Frost and his earlier film, The Elephant Man (1980).

The final shot in most episodes of Twin Peaks is of the iconic framed photograph of Laura Palmer, the high school prom queen found brutally murdered in the pilot episode.

Marc O’Day, whose incisive critique of the work of David Lynch accords best with my own views, describes Lynch as America’s foremost romantic filmmaker whose work “elaborate[s] a distinctive vision of the mythical, wholesome American innocent’s encounter with darkness, decay and evil”.

The brutal murder of Laura Palmer exposes the dark underside of the seemingly quiet, average town of Twin Peaks. The symbolic use of the framed photograph of Laura wearing a crown and a gown lends weight to O’Day’s further view positing a dissident conservatism in Lynch’s romantic vision, centring on the family idyll and its desecration.

And John Kenneth Muir’s argument almost certainly confirms it:

‘The death of Laura Palmer is greeted with terrible mourning throughout the first episode (even on the part of the taciturn school principal…) and Lynch seems to be playing on societal stereotypes about young blond women. The victim here is not randomly selected. On the contrary, Laura Palmer symbolizes something significant. Mid-way through the pilot, Lynch’s camera pushes in towards an athletic trophy case…where an iconic portrait of Laura stands — dead center of the shot. The implication drawn from the photograph’s placement in both the frame and the case, of course, is that golden-locked Laura is the ultimate trophy in America of the 1990s.’

This brings to mind the work of Melbourne-based visual artist, Emidio Puglielli (see his Frames & Edges series), who draws attention to the symbolic significance of the photograph. His focus on the material properties of the photograph (paper type, size, quality, condition) reveals the power the image has to transcend its materiality, granting it a symbolic-sacred-mythic-iconic status. By exposing the materiality of the photograph as object, Puglielli foregrounds our romance with the image.

In his blog entry Photographs within Photographs, Puglielli has posted a picture from 1895 of a woman holding a photograph in the manner of a Cartes-de-visite, a small visiting card-sized photograph made popular in the mid-nineteenth century. He tells us it was common practise at the time for people to be photographed with a photograph of a deceased or missing loved one and he illuminates this practise with a quote from Geoffery Batchen's essay Dreams of Ordinary Life which I requote in full below:

‘Cartes-de-visite are often about their reception, as if to underline the psychological or emotional experience that their viewing entails. Many pictures show people holding open photograph albums or simply feature people looking at another carte. It is a reminder that cartes were scaled to be viewed in the hand rather than on a wall; they were meant to be touched as well as seen… She poses for the camera to make visible an otherwise abstract experience, the pang of longing, the act of remembrance, the stretching of the imagination. It is as though she wants to draw our attention, not just to the particular image she holds, but to the comforting solidarity of photography’s contiguous memorial function. In touching her photograph she recalls that it too was touched, by that umbilical cord of light that once caressed her loved one and then this image in her hand. In touching it now, she returns the photographic experience to the realm of the body and to the intimacy of reverie’.

The consoling notion of the “the comforting solidarity of photography’s contiguous memorial function” connects for me with Lynch’s use of the framed photograph in The Elephant Man.

The film, an unashamedly sentimental, emotionally affecting melodrama, based on the life of severely deformed Joseph Merrick (John Merrick in the film), opens with the symbolic image of a framed photograph of Merrick’s mother. Throughout the film, Merrick gazes at her treasured portrait which also provides the film with its final, emotionally charged ending – a consoling vision of his mother assuring him that “nothing really dies” hinting at the promise of a reunion in death.

Sometimes, even the framed photographs belonging to others elicit empathic, reverent responses in recognition of their sacredness. This is the case with John Merrick whose admiring gaze over the photographs on Doctor Treves’ mantelpiece underscores the deep symbolic investment he has in the photographed image.

Unlike John Merrick, I must admit to a distaste for mantlepieces laden with multitudes of framed photographs. Perhaps it’s due to the trauma of being exposed to disingenuous memorials such as the ‘couple’ shots of former acquaintances whose portraits showed them draped on boulders (!) gazing in a stereotypically loving (and cringe-inducing) manner at one another. Or the scary studio glamour portrait photographs belonging to bad taste relatives.

However, I do like frames and particularly those I've used for my first frame up. Their dual function of protective casing and embellishment aids further in asserting the symbolic significance and sacredness of the image. And I am rather partial to my sacred stencil and paste up portraits.

(Lygon Street, Brunswick East)

dymo/stencil #026 - soledad puértolas

2010-08-24T10:40:00.003+10:00

(High Street, Thornbury)

Soledad Puértolas, whose work I much admire, is the writer I’d choose to translate if I ever did decide to have a go at literary translation (but it’s not going to happen).

As far as I can tell, only one of her novels (Burdeos – Bordeaux) has been translated into English.

There is a guilty pleasure in knowing her books are only available to select readers (Spanish, French, and German); however, I think it’s a shame to deprive English-speaking readers of her work.

Días del Arenal, the first novel of hers I read (and am currently rereading), introduced me to her style of fragmented narratives which I think convincingly conveys the way most people experience their existence: the predominant feelings are a sense of disconnection, disquiet, disorientation and uncertainty. In a fragmented narrative, the ‘whole’ story is never told, not in order to withhold information but because, as in real life, what we find out about others comes to us in bits and pieces, at different stages and involves multiple tellers.

In his book on the life of Goethe, John Armstrong offers an optimistic view of the fragmentary nature of biography:

...when we know another person, when we are friends with them, there are often large blank spaces in their history, as far as we are concerned. We may only have a sketchy – and probably one-sided – grasp of what occurred over substantial stretches of that person’s life. And yet our encounter with them is not puzzling or missing something. As we grow into a friendship, aspects of how the other person thinks and acts become part of the fabric of our life – part of how we see things, what we regard as possible, desirable, interesting or worthwhile.

In Puértolas’s novel, Historia de un abrigo, where the fragmented narrative is employed to a much greater extent, the narrator offers a similar view:

Some people don’t ask questions. They find out about the lives of others unintentionally, making do with whatever information comes their way. But they get this information through less tangible things, the way people talk and the things they look at, rather than from the details. (my translation)

Hay personas…que no preguntan nada. Se enteran como pueden de las historias de los demás, les bastan esos datos que se van dejando caer sin intención aparente. No se fijan tanto en los datos como en otra cosa. La forma en que se habla, en que se mira. Cosas menos tangibles, más reveladoras...

In another part of this novel, the narrator describes a less satisfying aspect of fragmentary experience:

She’s only known one part of her mother’s life because that is all we can know of the lives of others: parts, pieces, fragments, including the lives of those closest to us, the people we believe we know best. The life of her mother was much more than it appeared to be. She lived in more ways than she showed others and to her family… (my translation)

...Sólo ha conocido una parte de la vida de su madre, porque eso es lo que conocemos de las vidas de los demás, partes, trozos, fragmentos, incluso de las personas a quienes tenemos más cerca, las personas a quienes creemos conocer mejor. La vida de su madre era más amplia de lo que parecía, vivio mas de lo que les mostro a ellos, a su familia...

Even on rereading, the fragmentary narrative style of Días del Arenal has an impact. In the third section of the novel, we learn of the suicide of a character who had dominated an earlier part of the novel. However, her death is mentioned almost as an aside. Since the shift in focus in the third section has been onto a different character, its unexpected, unheralded insertion is strongly felt, akin to hearing terrible news about someone you knew and liked in the past but had lost contact with.

Reviewer Ramón Acín gives a precise description of the types of characters that Puértolas’s stories tend to centre on:

…personajes escurridizos, difuminados, perdidos…insatisfechos, cargados de enigmas y oscuridad…La vida estalla en ellos como algo complejo; esperan algo, deambulan en su busca y resisten, en tenaz lucha, los embates de sus fracasadas indagaciones…

(and here’s my bad attempt at a translation:)

…insignificant, marginal, lost protagonists; dissatisfied and perplexed by life which erupts on them as something complex and dark; waiting for something to happen, they struggle in search of a personal identity, resisting the onslaught of their failed quest that often leads to loneliness and melancholy.

Puértolas excels at creating an atmosphere of mystery and insecurity. She sets up situations that never take shape, initiates events that remain in suspense and sketches characters that then vanish. There are frequent shifts of focus on characters; often minor or secondary characters end up becoming central protagonists in different sections of her novels or in different short stories while the characters whose stories appeared to be central, vanish.

A bit like what happens to us later on in our own lives when, instead of collecting people, they begin to vanish (or are banished) from our lives for one reason or another and whose stories we may not hear about ever again. People once thought of as close and central to our lives suddenly no longer play such an important part and connections stall or simply fade. Not to mention all those plans that were never initiated or that never took shape...

Here’s a lovely fragmented photo of Soledad Puértolas from an interview in elcultural.es:

And read a review (in Spanish) of Días del Arenal by another fan.

dymo/stencil #025 - [mark] barrage

2010-08-17T11:33:00.005+10:00

(under NOISE tag, corner Beavers & High, Northcote)

I play Hero or Dirt? recorded in 2005 more often than Delays which he released in 2008.

But since then, Barrage appears to have become a Bartleby.

In his novel Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas explains the Bartleby syndrome in literature:

We all know the Bartlebys, they are beings inhabited by a profound denial of the world. They are named after the scrivener Bartleby, a clerk in a story by Herman Melville, who has never been seen reading, not even a newspaper; who for long periods stands looking out at a pale window behind a folding screen, upon a brick wall in Wall Street; who never drinks beer, or tea and coffee, like other men; who has never been anywhere, living as he does in the office, spending even his Sundays there; who has never said who he is, or where he comes from, or whether he has any relatives in this world; who, when he is asked where he was born or given a job to do or asked to reveal something about himself, responds always by saying,

“I would prefer not to.”

For some time I have been investigating the frequent examples of Bartleby’s syndrome in literature, for some time I have studied the illness, the disease, endemic to contemporary letters, the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness that means that certain creators, while possessing a very demanding literary conscience (or perhaps precisely because of this), never manage to write: either they write one or two books and then stop altogether or, working on a project, seemingly without problems, one day they become literally paralysed for good.

Has Barrage (aka Mark Barrage and probably really Mark Gomes) succumbed to Bartleby’s syndrome in music?

Perhaps he’s stopped making music altogether. Perhaps he would prefer not to.

Accompanied by syncopated, melancholy, lo-fi beats, the lyrics to many of the tracks in Hero or Dirt? suggest a tendency to Bartleby’s syndrome; they’re dark, sombre and aloof:

“There’s a gloom over Melbourne,” Barrage sings in Coming Apart

“I am defeated by the tide”, he sings in Tides

“They tell me I’m so cold/living a distance from myself,” from Unsentimental

Delays provides lo-fi highs, too, but its prevailing experimental sounds are lacking in sufficient gloom which is why I play Hero or Dirt? more often. Marceline and No Way Out provide moody vocals that perfectly satisfy “melancholy natures seeking unhappiness”*.

(*a description of Inez Institoris, a character in Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann [I’m still reading him]. Her cult for suffering has a tragic outcome [I should heed the warning]. The book tells the story of a composer who symbolically enters into a pact with the Devil offering his soul and body in return for twenty-four years of musical genius. [Coincidentally (?), Barrage sings about Satan in Lucifer Song on the album]).

Further Internet stalking suggests that Mark has ditched Barrage, reassumed Gomes and been appointed a literary editor. But whether or not, like the scrivener Bartleby, he’s standing for long periods looking out at a pale window upon a brick wall, preferring not to make more music, we can be fortunate that Hero or Dirt? remains on the planet for us to enjoy.

(I wonder if he’s read Melville's short story or Vila-Matas’s novel? He'd surely like both.)

dymo/stencil #024 - nina simone

2010-08-02T23:49:00.001+10:00

(outside Disco Beans - art gallery & performance space, High Street, Northcote)

Nina Simone’s Wild is the Wind is dangerous to my health. I try not to play it too often because whenever I hear it, I’m afraid I’m not going to make it to the end of the song.

What could be so terrifying about someone singing about love and longing?

The title itself is warning enough and with lyrics that belie her anguished delivery of the song - it’s anything but a sentimental crowd pleaser. Its minimal piano and tentative vocal introduction hint at restraint. But as the song continues, it becomes clear that passion will overwhelm. With an almost operatic force, it builds to a chilling, dramatic crescendo.

It’s astonishing.

And like much of her music, it manages to reach what Kafka describes as the frozen sea within us.

Love me love me love me

Say you do

Let me fly away

with you

For my love is like

the wind

And wild is the wind

Give me more

than one caress

Satisfy this

hungriness

Let the wind

blow through your heart

For wild is the wind

You...

touch me...

I hear the sound

of mandolins

You...

kiss me...

With your kiss

my life begins

You're spring to me

All things

to me

Don't you know you're

life itself

Like a leaf clings

to a tree

Oh my darling,

cling to me

For we're creatures

of the wind

And wild is the wind

So wild is the wind

Wild is the wind

On a (sort of) related note, I’ve been reading John Armstrong’s book on the life of Goethe. His discussion of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther suggested interesting parallels between the story and the lyrics of Wild is the Wind:

[Werther’s] experience (of unrequited love leading to his suicide) seems to suggest something terrible about life. He regards love as sacred – as the most important emotion. However, there is no guarantee that love, however ardent, will be returned: that the world will meet it and reward it...

Give me more

than one caress

Satisfy this

hungriness

…

Like a leaf clings

to a tree

Oh my darling,

cling to me

…Werther’s life is collapsing, and it is his passion that is the cause of this. He prefers death to life without [Lotte].

Love me love me love me

Say you do

…

Don't you know you're

life itself

I sometimes...OK, I confess, I often descend into admiration for these kinds of extreme states, especially in films and music, enjoying the guilty pleasure now and then of watching melodramas and listening to sentimental ballads. But I also admire the way Goethe and Nina Simone transform these states in their writing and music into great art, evoking sympathy while avoiding sentimentality.

Armstrong maintains that even though Goethe’s writing evinces a strong sympathy for the extremes of despair and confusion, he does not glorify or ennoble these states:

The extraordinary finesse with which Goethe has revealed Werther’s passion for Lotte makes us sympathise deeply with him – infact identify with him…

[But] Goethe didn’t see Werther’s tragedy turning on thwarted love. It hinges on the condition of mind in which Werther faces what is after all a very normal experience – loving but not being loved as much in return…There is a fatal problem with the way he thinks and feels and this converts a series of rather ordinary difficulties into a personal catastrophe…

With genuine Romantics [Goethe] shared an interest in despair, passion and wildness; he didn’t share their admiration for these extreme states.

And as for Wild is the Wind, it’s clear there is no self-indulgence in the torment being expressed.

One can only truly appreciate great works of art at a terrible personal cost.

(outside Disco Beans - art gallery & performance space, High Street, Northcote)

dymo/stencil #023 - max steele

2010-07-26T23:37:00.018+10:00

(day shot near the bus stop outside Xplicit Gents Club, Separation St, Northcote)

In Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, older brother Thomas has this to say about his younger brother Christian:

…Christian is very incautious – undignified…something is lacking in him – what people call equilibrium, mental poise…self-control and personal reserve are both lacking…Christian busies himself too much with himself, with what goes on in his own inside…he has a regular mania for bringing out the deepest…of these…there is such a lack of modesty in so much communicativeness…

I have a soft spot for spillers like, Christian.

Max Steele, whose intimate blog entries are tagged: Apocalypse, Feelings are Hard, Imaginary Boyfriends, Music, Nightmares, Pain, Revenge, Romance, and Tooth Drama, is a spiller, too.

He’s a writer, performance artist, go-go dancer and singer living in NY (more enviable bio info here) but I only really know him as a blogger. I’ve been following his blog (it’s so much easier than stalking) for about a year now.

It’s a chatty, lyrical and verbose chronicle that’s often punctuated with unexpectedly candid revelations:

Basically what I'm doing is trying to make art out of the feeling of profound disappointment that certain people won't be my boyfriends. Dated 7/19/10

Too broke to continue seeing a therapist, the blog is also the site of much self-reflection and analysis – a mélange of self-doubt, angst, melancholy and optimism:

Last night I was working on some writing, and getting really down on myself. I sort of was doing that usual "You're a fake, you have no talent and nothing to say" trip on myself (Y'KNOW IT'S CALLED "THE ARTIST'S WAY" OR WHATEVER) and I was so bummed out. I thought: "Great, I'm quitting my job to be broke and have more time to devote to my writing, which sucks and makes everybody hate me." But then I actually had some initial / good ideas and I felt better. So maybe all I need is a little more time to get over my self-hatred, work out some demons. You never know. I think it's a step in the right direction. Dated 7/19/10

In an entry entitled Bad Theatre, dated 10/22/09, Max asks:

Is it fair to ask people to pay me money to hear, essentially, stories? Is that really fair?

It’s worth it, Max. You give good text. (And it’s worth reading the entry in full.)

I sometimes ask myself: Is it fair that people have to put up with my stencils, essentially, graffiti? Is that really fair?

Someone called olsmokey would say it isn’t. Here’s what olsmokey had to say about the removal of a Bansky stencil by Melbourne city council workers who painted over it a couple of months ago:

Graffiti isn't art, it's vandalism. Big deal, he uses stencils. Oh wow, how artistic. Sandblast the crap off the walls and send the bill to him...

But then when I saw the photo of Max in Interview Magazine I thought, Oh wow, it would make a pretty good stencil and I think it’s fair to say he looks great in purple on the yellow pole outside Xplicit (my chess partner reckons it brings out his brooding quality better than the photo…). Sadly, I'm predicting he won't last long there...which will be a shame given he's a major improvement on the gents who usually loiter outside the club on venue nights.

(night shot near the bus stop outside Xplicit Gents Club, Separation St, Northcote)

Here's Max talking about his face:

And here's a present my friend Ulrikären bought me a few years ago:

('Max' jug, a treasured gift from Ulrikären)

dymo/stencil #022 - salem

2010-07-19T23:55:00.001+10:00

(really bad stencil outside Bose Hitek Audio Video, High Street, Thornbury)

Chicago/Michigan trio Salem, pioneers of ‘drag’, coined the neologism themselves to describe their (exquisitely) slowed down or ‘screwed’ music style. 'Drag' is a debated term (also referred to as ‘witch house’, ‘haunted house’, ‘screwgaze’ or ‘crunk shoegaze’) and describes a genre of dark electronic music featuring a prominent hip hop influence. A more admirable description of the band’s style is done by Scott Wright in his post about them in the Guardian. And read even more attempts to define the band's style here.

Problems with genre aside, their dark, moody, melancholy electronic beats are devastatingly good – but like their signature sound, it’s been a long drawn out wait for any new material from the band.

After reading an interview with band member John Holland in the December 2008/January2009 edition of Butt, I tried getting copies of their limited edition, four track EPs Yes, I Smoke Crack and Water but both had sold out immediately after being released. What else can one do in a situation like that but turn to downloading shared MP3s? Further digging yielded FuCKT, a 12 track file (Internet album?) also from 2008 (?) containing three of my favourite songs. They've been good company since then but I’ve been hanging out for some new music.

The protracted wait is over – they’re releasing their debut album King Night in September!

Favourite track(s):

Hoodrych – it’s strained, dissonant, eerily beautiful and agonisingly, almost intolerably, exquisite – a real dark pleasure.

Dirt is a great track, too. The band filmed and directed their own video of it. The minute's silence that opens the video establishes the tension and shows a woman locking herself in a garage with the car still running. Carbon monoxide provides the smoky, soft focus effects while a gyrating, naked woman adds a soft porn element to a disquieting (definitely NSFW) video.

And Heather Marlatt’s serenely eerie vocals on BruStreet (a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Philadelphia) are beautiful.

I was bruised and battered and I couldn't tell

What I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
I saw my reflection in a window I didn't know
My own face
Oh brother are you gonna leave me
Wasting away
On the streets

I walked the avenue till my legs felt like stone
I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone
At night I could hear the blood in my veins
Black and whispering as the rain
On the streets

Ain't no angel gonna greet me
It’s just you and I my friend
My clothes don't fit me no more
I walked a thousand miles
Just to slip the skin

The night has fallen, I'm lying awake
I can feel myself fading away
So receive me brother with your faithless kiss
Or will we leave each other alone like this
On the streets

dymo/paste up #010 - thomas mann (again)

2010-07-15T22:53:00.137+10:00

(Antiques shop, High Street, Northcote)

This re-paste up of Thomas Mann is an attempt to redress the premature disappearance of my original (larger) paste up (lasting only 24 hours) and to allow me to display his beauty once more and also give me the opportunity to say a few things about his novella, Death in Venice (which I’ve just reread…four times…five soon…I’ll explain in a moment).

The story’s details are based on actual events: while in Venice in 1911 with his wife and brother, Thomas Mann became captivated by a boy who was staying at the same hotel. In the story, an aging writer, Aschenbach, experiences a sudden and intensely passionate disorientation (beautifully put by Anthony Heilbut) after becoming infatuated with a young boy, Tadzio, who is staying at the same hotel.

Aschenbach’s passion, which can be read as both sexual and symbolic, is unrequited. There is never any direct contact with Tadzio and Aschenbach’s/Mann’s cynical view of this type of desire is clear: “Beauty…which is Form…and naïvety lead to intoxication and lust; they may lead a noble mind into terrible criminal emotions…they lead…to the abyss.” In other words, the pursuit of erotic beauty, at the expense of reason and self-control, leads to degradation and death.

Aschenbach is eventually undone by his passion. Aware of the outbreak of cholera in Venice, not only does he not warn Tadzio or his family to leave (at which point, according to Anthony Heilbut, Aschenbach “become[s] criminally culpable”), he chooses to risk his own health by staying on in Venice in order to continue his pursuit of Tadzio. The story ends with his death, most likely from cholera, on the same day that Tadzio leaves.

It should be noted that Mann’s stay in Venice did not end in either degradation or death.

Although Mann dramatises his real life encounter in the novella, the story is not wholly shaped by it. In Death in Venice, Mann explores a variety of recurring themes in his work: the conflict between art and life, chaos and order, youth and aging, growth and decay.

Prompted by a new translation (oh, oh!) of Death in Venice by Michael Henry Heim, Andrew O’Hehir’s reliable review of the story is an invigorating and inspiring reappraisal of the novella. He reminds us that as a work of fiction, over-attention to its biographical incident can make us miss the point:

“Like all of Mann's other books, Death in Venice is a nest of interlocking keys and symbols in which scarcely a word is wasted, a careful balance of opposing polarities and apparent contradictions in which no final, definitive interpretation can defeat all others. This is a book about Italy written by a German, a book about homosexual love written by a married man who fathered six children, a book about a man who debases himself and embraces his own death written by a man who lived to age 80 as the very embodiment of bourgeois literary respectability.”

It’s a solid review and worth reading in full at Salon.com

Rereading Death in Venice reminded me of my own parallel experience of infatuation – an infatuation with the photo of Thomas Mann which I came across in this book I’d bought as a birthday gift for a friend. (Borrowing heavily from Mann), it was with astonishment that when I saw the photo I noticed how entirely beautiful he was.

I became obsessed with getting a copy of the photo. I had to do a paste up of it.

At my friend’s birthday party, I enacted my own Aschenbachian descent. Reproaching myself for not having made a copy of the photo before giving her the book, I found it increasingly difficult to sublimate my desire to somehow get a copy of the photo before the party finished. Dismissing the idea of simply tearing out the page (as a crime against books), I stalked the book, finding myself returning frequently to the room where my friend had left it, hovering near it, pretending to make conversation with other party guests while all the time thinking of ways to make a copy of the photo. (Would it be rude to ask to borrow back a gift I had just given? Could I just take the book and replace it and hope she wouldn’t notice? How would I hide a hardback under my coat? Was there a printer with a photocopy function somewhere in the house?) I was feeling increasingly disoriented. Then suddenly I remembered I had my phone/camera with me. Dispensing with good party manners, I ditched the group conversation, grabbed the book, found a quiet corner and started taking photos. I overheard one nosy party guest attempting to draw attention to what I was doing with his admonishing: “Look, he’s taking photos!” Dignity no longer mattered. I had my photo at last.

Thomas Mann is right: intoxication and lust can make you behave inappropriately.

As with my first blog entry on Mann, I continue to obsess over the different translations of his work. I just happen to have four different translations of Death in Venice. Mad and perverse, I know, but that’s how it is. And soon I’ll have a fifth: Michael Henry Heim’s translation, especially after Andrew O’Hehir’s promise that “Aschenbach's story no longer feels antique; in this illuminating new English version, Death in Venice comes back to life.”

In his book Literary Translation, A Practical Guide (a gift, and none too subtle hint, from my chess partner who still thinks I should give translation a go), Clifford Landers draws attention to the unending “skein of choices” the literary translator faces.

Starting with the original German text, and in order of preference, I present the same excerpt from each of the four translations of Death in Venice:

The original German text:

Seine ebenmäβigen Brauen zeichneten sich schärfer ab, seine Augen dunkelten tief. Er war schöner, als es sich sagen läβt, und Aschenbach empfand wie schon oftmals mit Schmerzen, daβ das Wort die sinnliche Schönheit nur zu preisen, nicht wiederzugeben vermag.

1. David Luke’s translation:

His symmetrical eyebrows stood out more sharply, his eyes seemed much darker. He was more beautiful than words can express, and Aschenbach felt, as so often already, the painful awareness that language can only praise sensuous beauty, but not reproduce it.

2. Joachim Neugroschel’s translation

His symmetrical eyebrows stood out more sharply, his eyes darkened deeply. He was more beautiful than any words could say, and Aschenbach painfully felt, as so often before, that language can only praise, but not reproduce the beauty that appeals to the senses.

3. Helen T Lowe-Porter’s translation:

The shapely brows were so delicately drawn, the eyes so deeply dark – lovelier he was than words could say, and as often the thought visited Aschenbach, and brought its own pang, that language could but extol, not reproduce, the beauties of the sense.

4. Kenneth Burke’s translation:

His regular eyebrows showed up more sharply, the darkness of his eyes was deeper. It is hard to say how beautiful he was; and Aschenbach was distressed, as he had often been before, by the thought that words can only evaluate sensuous beauty, but not re-give it.

Landers’ would argue that “each [translation] convey[s] the same information but differ[s] significantly in aesthetic effect; each is defensible, and each would have its defenders, but the literary translator must make a choice…” But “must make a choice” equates to dread and trauma for me. I will continue to resist translating.

I’m a big fan of words and I have a voracious appetite for text but Thomas Mann is right in attesting to the inadequacy of language to describe beauty. Lengthy rambling post aside, I prefer doing paste ups and stencils to writing because they can clearly show what words must struggle to describe.

dymo/stencil #021 - zarah leander

2010-07-04T22:45:00.004+10:00

The aesthetics of Trübsinn

(gloomy shot, Town Hall end of High St, Northcote)

With an unparalleled talent for portraying suffering in song and film, who better than Zarah Leander to indulge one’s sense of gloominess?

Her contralto voice and moody, romantic songs have accompanied me during (frequent) periods of wistful self-indulgence.

She’s captivating in Douglas Sirk’s gloomy 1937 melodramas, Zu neuen Ufern and La Habanera, alternating from a whispered delivery of her dialogue to singing heartrending songs in her signature dark voice.

In Zu neuen Ufern, Zarah plays the role of a singer in Victorian England who takes the blame for her lover’s crime of forgery and is transported to Parramatta prison, Sydney (!). After serving her sentence, she attempts a return to the stage singing Ich steh’ im Regen but is booed off by the Australian audience for her gloomy act...which I thought was quite uncharitable, considering her song is so heartbreakingly good:

In La Habanera, Zarah sings Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt… it’s an extraordinary performance in an extraordinary scene...dressed in Latin costume, but with an über-Germanic vocal style, she sings about irresolute tropical desire (!) ... it’s astonishing and memorable (credit to my chess partner for the translation of the beautiful lyrics):

Alone I am at night, my soul is awake, listening

Heart, can you hear the palms singing and whispering

The wind sang me a song of fortune, so unspeakably beautiful

It knows what my heart lacks and for whom it beats and glows

It knows for whom.
Come, oh come.

The wind sang me a song about my missing soul mate

At the beach I often stood and hoped for, for what?

I watched colourful birds - oh dear, my happiness shattered like glass

The wind sang me a song of fortune, so unspeakably beautiful

It knows what my heart lacks and for whom it beats and glows

It knows for whom.
Come, oh come.

The wind sang me a song about my missing soul mate

Thanks, once again, to David Stratton’s (sadly defunct programme), Cinema Classics, for screening La Habanera all those years ago. English subtitled versions of her other films are very hard to come by. Die große Liebe is easily available on the net and I recently found Damals on EU Torrents but have had no further luck with any of her other films. Naturally all her films are available on Amazon.de but they don’t have English subtitles. I’ve got Premiere, too, but can’t find any subtitles for it so I’m relying on my chess partner to do a simultaneous translation (whenever you’re ready…). There’s always the hope that Melbourne Cinémathèque will have a Zarah Leander feature one day…

(bright shot, Town Hall end of High St, Northcote)

Other homages of note:

Read Ben Letzler’s tribute to Zarah here

And check out Nina Hagen’s version of Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt:

Allein bin ich in der Nacht, meine Seele wacht und lauscht.

Herz, hörst du, wie es klingt, in den Palmen singt und rauscht

Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt

Am Meer stand ich Abends oft und ich hab gehofft, auf was?

Ich sah bunten Vögeln nach - ach, mein Glück zerbrach wie Glas.

Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt von einem Glück, unsagbar schön.

Er weiß, was meinem Herzen fehlt, für wen es schlägt und glüht.

Er weiß für wen.
Komm, komm, Ach.
Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt, von einem Herzen, das mir fehlt.

dymo/paste up #009 - joseph schmidt

2010-06-19T21:15:00.006+10:00

(Corner Elm/High Streets, Northcote)

Imagine being on the planet without ever having heard Joseph Schmidt sing. I can’t.

In his day, he had one of the most beautiful, lyric, tenor voices in the German-speaking world and his popular song recordings were the best-sellers of the time.

This is one of my favourite Joseph Schmidt songs, E lucevan le stelle, an aria from the third act of the opera Tosca by Giacomo Puccini. In the opera, it is sung by Tosca's lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi, while waiting for his coming execution.

E lucevan le stelle (1933)

Joseph Schmidt’s discographer, Hansfried Sieben, tells us that at the outbreak of the Second World War, Schmidt decided to emigrate and went to France in an attempt to get a visa for the USA. However, the French authorities refused permission for him to travel and when Germany declared war on the USA, all shipping services were suspended putting paid to his hopes of finding safety on foreign soil.

He tried to seek refuge in Switzerland. Sadly, (unlike the poster beside my paste up), Swiss law did not recognise Jews as political refugees and he was turned back. He then attempted to enter Switzerland illegally, was caught and put into the Girenbad internment camp near Zurich. There he fell ill and a short time after died at the Waldegg inn, the place where he found his last warm refuge.

I discovered Joseph Schmidt after seeing him in the film Ein Lied geht um die Welt (My Song Goes Round the World) years ago on David Stratton’s (much missed) weekly programme Cinema Classics on SBS. It is a wonderful film - funny, sentimental and sad but it is Joseph’s golden voice that matters. His role in the film was almost the story of his own life: the story of a small statured singer whose voice girls fell in love with but whom they took pity on because of his height. It’s heartbreaking. Click here to view a scene from the film where he sings Mal d’amore.

[My paste up of Joseph Schmidt was in part prompted by re-reading Der Bajazzo by Thomas Mann. Like the mother in the story who plays Chopin slowly so as to enjoy the melancholy cadence of the music, I listen to Joseph Schmidt’s rendition of E lucevan le stelle to savour to the utmost the sadness of every note:

…where my mother sat playing the piano.

The room was dull, for thick dark-red curtains half-shrouded the windows. The white figures of gods and goddesses on the wall hangings stood out plastically from their blue background and seemed as though listening to the deep, heavy first notes of a Chopin nocturne which was her favourite piece. She always played it very slowly, as though to enjoy to the full each melancholy cadence.

(Translated by Helen T Lowe-Porter)

…where my mother sat playing the piano.

She sat in a dim light, for heavy dark red curtains hung across the windows; and the white gods and goddesses on the wallpaper seemed to stand out like real rounded figures from their blue background, and to be listening to the deep heavy opening notes of that Chopin nocturne, the piece she especially loved and always played very slowly as if to savour to the utmost the sadness of every chord.

(Same passage translated by David Luke)

I don’t speak German so I can’t attest to the fidelity of each translation but I know which version I like the sound of. More on the subject of my current obsession with translation to follow...]

dymo/stencil #020 & dymo/paste up #008 - thomas mann

2010-06-01T00:00:00.052+10:00

(Thomas Mann stencil...at one end of High St, Northcote)

(and Thomas Mann paste up, at the other end of High St, Northcote)

My chess partner suggested I try my hand at literary translation but I’m not so sure I could deal with the flak should I (most likely) prove to be really bad at it.

When reading fiction in translation in the past, I didn’t use to consider the fidelity of the translation. I just took it for granted that it was “good”.

It wasn’t until I accidentally read two different translations of the same text that I began to pay more attention to the quality of the translation. Thomas Mann’s short story, Der Bajazzo, was originally translated as The Dilettante by Helen T Lowe-Porter. It was this version I read (and enjoyed) first. Some years later, I stumbled on David Luke’s translation of the same story which he calls The Joker and which I assumed was a Thomas Mann story I’d never read. After reading the first paragraph I immediately recognised it as The Dilettante. It seemed a better translation (precise, modern, fluent) yet strangely less engaging.

I wondered what other readers thought of the two different translations and discovered that Luke is generally considered to be Thomas Mann’s finest translator, praised for his “semantically reliable” translations that do justice to the complexities of Mann’s prose, whereas Lowe-Porter’s translations of Mann’s works (to which she had the exclusive rights for over twenty years) are much maligned for her textual errors, omissions and condensations. Here’s a sample of the hatchet job on Lowe-Porter’s translations:

“inadequate”; “damaging”; “deeply flawed”; “major, even catastrophic errors”; “basic errors or ‘schoolboy howlers’ revealing a deep misunderstanding of German grammar and vocabulary”; “unforgivable” ; “regarded as a scandal in the translation world”

Who would have thought the world of literary translation is open to scandal!

Can a bad or mediocre translation convey a writer’s essence? Adam Thirlwell's optimistic views about literary translation provide some relief. He suggests that style is inherently translatable, even if its translation is not perfect. Wyatt Mason agrees:

If translations were so routinely terrible and so generally unreadable, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Flaubert and Stendhal and Kafka and Proust and Mann—whose translators have been mocked and derided by generations of critics—would have had no hope of finding readers beyond their respective shores. Given that these writers have readers around the world, the ire and indignation felt by those who take at translators comes not over the errancy of translation but its adequacy: however error-ridden and technically troubling a translation might be—the syntax clumsy, the vocabulary misleading, the dialogue wooden—translations have nonetheless managed, somehow, to convey their sources sufficiently for their originals survive, not to say thrive, far from home.

Even though I wasn’t traumatised by Lowe-Porter’s translation of Der Bajazzo, I was (and still am) shocked to discover that she “often failed to notice ironical undertones and left out phrases when she failed to understand either their function or their meaning”. In his biography of Thomas Mann, Ronald Hayman finds it unforgivable that Lowe-Porter omits the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph of his novella Death in Venice. He argues that this omission deprives the reader of a final glimpse into the main character’s (Aschenbach) consciousness:

It was impossible for most English readers to understand the end of Death in Venice until a new translation by David Luke appeared…With the missing sentence restored…[it] rounds the story off by adding a layer of inevitability to [Aschenbach’s] death…

Marianne Zerner justifiably argues that a bad translation possibly “seriously threatens the aesthetic appreciation of the story”. Her point about the title, Der Bajazzo, is convincing:

…the German title [Der Bajazzo] becomes sufficiently intelligible once the [story has been read]. [The reader is able to form…] a picture of that typical hero of German impressionist literature for whom Lowe-Porter's "Dilettante" is … only a one-sided designation. An objection may [also] be raised against the addition of "mountebank" as an adequate equivalent for "Bajazzo “, since the English lacks the tragic undertone of the German...

In his essay, Thomas Mann in English, Martin Greenberg acknowledges the errors and omissions of Lowe-Porter’s translations but does not dismiss them completely. He argues that “Mann’s work needs more correct translation” but finds himself turning away, “irritated and bored” by John E Woods’ and Luke’s “word accurate” translations, back to Lowe-Porter, whose translations he suggests have more feeling and style.

I want to revisit Thomas Mann but I’m reluctant to do so via Lowe-Porter’s translations which are widely condemned. If there are multiple translations of a text, I think it’s worth investigating which translation is considered reliable.

For more crimes committed against literature, read this review of the translation of Gombrowicz’s novel Transatlanyk at The Complete Review (dymo/stencil and/or paste up of Gombrowicz to follow at a future date).

And read the transcript of a discussion on contemporary debate in literary translation from The ABC Book Show.

(Note to my chess partner: you could force my move to literary translation by providing me with a copy of this book. It’s officially on my book wish list...checkmate.)

dymo/paste up #007 - harold robbins

2010-05-06T23:30:00.008+10:00

(outside Allsorts Books, High St, Northcote - a great new place to hang out)

I wanted to revisit Harold Robbins recently but didn’t have any copies of his books on my shelves. I probably dumped them at the local book exchange years ago after buying into the myth of the high art/low art distinction.

There’d be no trouble finding secondhand copies of his books at a book exchange but sadly, there are hardly any left in Melbourne and none I could find in the inner city. (There used to be a really good one in Thornbury but it closed down after the owner was murdered in the store.) (No resemblance to a HR story intended.)

I tried a couple of the newer secondhand bookshops that have sprung up around the inner city recently but had no luck. I asked one bookseller where he thought I might be able to find copies of HR’s books and he said: “You’ll have to go to the ‘burbs for that.”

Not that I required any further proof that the high art/low art distinction is nothing more than a class distinction but it was confirmed by his response. Ironically, “the ‘burbs” is exactly where I did end up locating my replacement copies of HR’s books – in a fantastic, old-fashioned, book, music (and even DVD!) exchange on Mt Alexander Road, opposite the bus terminus at Moonee Ponds.

Back in the days when the local library shelves were chock full of “bonkbusters”, HR’s novels were a guilty, pre-teens, pleasure for me. His books are unabashedly trashy, full of lurid (and laughable) sexcapades but they’re also page-turning stories. I think I agree with Andrea Toback who suggests that as it was the time of the sexual revolution, “it made sexually explicit scenes mandatory in books and movies. The scenes didn’t have to be very realistic or even interesting (they weren’t), they rarely included anything approximating love; they just had to be there.”

HR’s best trashy 3:
1.    The Carpetbaggers
2.    The Adventurers
3.    The Betsy

And then there are the trashfest film versions of HR’s novels, best summed up by devil_doll12 from Canada who describes the film version of The Lonely Lady as …not to my liking, but I couldn't stop watching…

And if that isn’t enough of an enticement to watch the film, then this Wikipedia entry should do it:

The Lonely Lady was hugely panned by critics, where the film was nominated for 11 Golden Raspberry Awards and won 6 including: Worst Picture, Worst Actress, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst Musical Score and Worst Original Song (The Way You Do It). Pia Zadora won Worst New Star of the Decade for this film. She was also nominated for Worst Actress of the Century, but lost to Madonna.

(download it from Cinemageddon)

dymo/stencil #019 - snoop dogg

2010-04-22T22:01:00.011+10:00

(High St, Northcote)

Snoop Dogg...G Funk hero...rated AG for All Good ...

G funk is funk music with an artificially lowered tempo, incorporating multi-layered and melodic synthesizers, slow hypnotic grooves, deep bass, a slurred “lazy” way of rapping to stay in rhythmic cadence, background female vocals, extensive sampling of p-funk tunes, and a high portamento sine wave keyboard lead...

It really does sound this good.

A couple of (nostalgic) shout outs…

To Wayne Fernandez, influential Melbourne DJ who presented WKD on PBS 106.7FM (sadly no longer on the air and Wayne's no longer in Melbourne)…the 90s would not have been the same…WKD was the main source for RnB and Hip Hop in Melbourne at the time and made Saturday night a good night to stay indoors.

And also to Vicky (P?) and Sally from the Valley who presented FUNK SKOOL, another great PBS show dedicated to RnB and Hip Hop.

Enjoy this Snoop and Pharrell duet (what a perfect combination) which has a great stenciling intro:

syndrome #004

2010-04-20T15:13:00.000+10:00

Foreign accent syndrome

dymo/stencil #018 - joseph conrad

2010-04-05T23:15:00.037+10:00

(Lygon St, Brunswick East. Thanks for the can of red for my bday, Barbara...I wasn't so sure about this mid-life crisis colour at first but I reckon Conrad looks pretty good in red...and no Dan, it's not Joseph Stalin.)

Why read?

In Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard says that reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust. I have to agree.

Over the years, Conrad's novels have made life on this planet more bearable. Recently I read Victory. Axel Heyst, the disillusioned central character (aptly described as the Hamlet of the sea), reminded me of Von Doderer's opening paragraph to Every Man a Murderer:

"Everyone’s childhood is plumped down over his head like a bucket. The contents of this bucket are at first unknown. But throughout life, the stuff drips down on him slowly – and there’s no sense changing clothes or costume, for the dripping will continue."

In Conrad’s novel, Axel’s father, a disenchanted philosopher whose pessimistic books discourage involvement in life, ‘plump[s] down [his attitude] over [Axel’s] head’. Axel adopts his father’s scepticism and as an adult, seeks solitude and refuge from humanity on a remote island in the Malay Archipelago.

“For fifteen years Heyst had wandered…

‘I’ll drift,’ Heyst had said to himself deliberately.

He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He meant to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything.

‘This shall be my defence against life,’ he had said to himself with a sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there was no other worthy alternative.”

The major concern of Victory is the nature of Axel's attempt to live a life of detachment and philosophical isolation and whether it is possible to live such a life of solitude, apart from the sufferings of humanity.

Conrad’s novel is gripping and Axel’s belated conversion to life is bitterly moving and tragic. Its status as a minor/deficient work is being reassessed which may bring it the greater attention it deserves.

Conrad's novels shall be my defence against life.

Another fan of Victory here.

dymo/paste up #006 - federico garcia lorca

2010-02-22T22:50:00.014+11:00

Comprendo que no existe
El camino derecho
Sólo un gran laberinto
De encrucijadas múltiples

(I know there is no
Straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads)

From Los puentes colgantes

smallblock cafe, brunswick east

dymo/stencil #017 - j.m.g. le clézio

2010-01-14T23:33:00.004+11:00

(late evening, high st, northcote)

"If you really want to know, I'd rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing's done now, of course, and I can't alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything..." from Introductory Letter to the short story collection Fever written in 1964.

Fortunately for us, Le Clézio chose to stay on the planet and has continued to write.

dymo/stencil #016 - robert walser

2009-12-29T23:32:00.016+11:00

ANZ Bank, Elm St Northcote

Robert Walser circa 1905...around the time that he wrote his first, semi-autobiographical novel, The Tanners. 

Better late than never, though I had hoped to do this stencil on 25th as a commemoration to Walser who died of a heart attack in the snow on Christmas day in 1956...a death prophetically foretold in The Tanners when Simon Tanner discovers the poet, Sebastian, dead in the snow under a starry sky:

"...he'd frozen to death here...and he must have been lying here on the path for a while. The snow displayed no footprints; it was conceivable he'd been here for a considerable length of time...Night had fallen. Stars were sparkling...'How noble a grave he chose for himself. His resting place lies amid splendid green snow-covered firs. I shall not report this to anyone. Nature gazes down upon her dead man, the stars are quietly singing at his head and the night birds are squawking -- this is the best music for a person who no longer feels or hears.'"

In his novel, Doctor Pasavento, an homage to Walser, Enrique Vila-Matas describes Simon's words as an "auto-elegy anticipated".

I haven't (yet) read Walser's most renowned work, Jakob von Gunten, but I thoroughly recommend The Tanners. Simon Tanner is wonderfully subversive and often very funny and I found myself drawn to and rereading the sections with the poet, Sebastian. At one point, Simon’s older brother, Kaspar, berates Sebastian for devoting his life to writing poems, referring to it as “not work, it’s just a hiding-place for the idle.” The narrator explains that “[Kaspar] had no understanding whatever for tragic individuals, or rather, he understood them all too easily, all too well, and therefore had no respect for them.” Later, Hedwig, Simon and Kaspar’s sister, defends Sebastian:

“And never be so swift to look in scorn upon someone who is failing or appears lethargic or inactive. How quickly his sunshine, his poems can arise from these long, dull dreams!”

Walser understands tragic individuals. He sees ambition in the unambitious. Read him for his quiet defence of dreamers.

Monica Carter's thoughts on the book are closest to mine.

And always have time for Kubla Khan's thoughts.

More Walseriana here.

And 3 stories, previously unavailable in English translation here.

dymo/stencil (paste up) #015 - rosina bulwer lytton

2009-12-04T23:09:00.021+11:00

Rosina Bulwer Lytton

Irish beauty, satirist & tormented wife

High Street, Northcote

Seemingly unworthy of meriting her own entry in the Dictionary of Writers by Larousse (or in any of my other companions/compendiums/continuums to literature), she is mentioned only in her husband Edward’s entry as the ‘Irish beauty’ he married.

Most of the discussion of her work I’ve come across centres on the way she used her writing to parody her husband and his family in her novels as a means of avenging herself for the terrible treatment she endured at their hands, including Edward’s adultery and violence towards her.

Unlike her husband’s books, Rosina’s have been virtually unobtainable. Fortunately, print-on-demand technology is redressing this situation, ensuring Rosina did not have to suffer for nothing.

Click on the link to read/download her first novel, [Cheveley; or The Man of Honour], written in 1839. As well as being a thinly disguised and very witty hatchet job on her husband, his family and his friends, her novel is also an observant polemic on the oppressive conditions under which, women, especially married women, lived.

Read also [The Blighted Life], Rosina’s essay chronicling the events surrounding her incarceration in a Victorian madhouse by her husband and her subsequent release a few weeks later.

Dymo/paste up #005 – widower with sons, cologne, before 1914

2009-10-27T22:35:00.020+11:00

(doorway in lygon st, brunswick east)

Cover photo for the Sun & Moon Press edition of [Heimito von Doderer's] novel Every Man a Murderer (1938).

The wonderful opening paragraph of the novel shows how apt this photo is:

zweite Wirklichkeit
Apperzeptionsverweigerung
Menschwerdung

Von Doderer is concerned with the way individuals perceive, or refuse to perceive reality and many of his stories are thematically connected by the pattern of conflict and resolution … typically, the central character, emotionally crippled, often by a childhood trauma, starts off trapped in a zweite Wirklichkeit (secondary reality or false reality) which is maintained by the exercise of Apperzeptionsverweigerung (a refusal to apperceive reality). The individual can only break out of this secondary reality and liberate themselves by undergoing Menschwerdung, a sudden shock of recognition or self-discovery. Often Menschwerdung is triggered by a word, an image or a smell which unravels past experience. By shedding false perceptions and facing life as it is, that person becomes (painfully) human.

dymo/paste up #004 - two serious ladies: jane bowles & cherifa

2009-10-12T22:36:00.017+11:00

[up for 24 hours at Weston St tramstop, Brunswick East]

Jane Bowles with her lover of 20 years, Cherifa, a ‘wild girl’ uniformly despised & feared by everyone around Jane. Cherifa was also rumoured to have poisoned Jane to death.

Fortunately for us, Jane’s only novel, [Two Serious Ladies], survives … a remarkable but seriously neglected and underrated book … [Kathy Justice Gentile’s study] of Jane Bowles’ work sums up best Bowles’ main themes: the concept of existential dread associated with choice and the original strategies employed by her heroines to confront dread.

More on the concept of dread [here].