ictus
Sunday, 13 February 2011
the mighty shaka
Follow-up to previous - a short clip of one unsung lynchpin of UK reggae who got only a passing mention in 'Reggae Brittania'. This gives an authentic flavour of entering a Shaka night in all its murderously heavy, quasi-mystical intensity. Nothing to match it.
'bassline runnin' tru your solar plexus'
Enthralling BBC documentary on the history of UK reggae last night, with contributions from seminal figures like Prince Buster, Bunny Lee, Sugar Minott, Big Youth, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Dennis Bovell, as well as members of Aswad, Steel Pulse, the Specials and The Slits:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ydp83/Reggae_Britannia/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ydp83/Reggae_Britannia/
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Travelling with Rimbaud 2
(After Rimbaud – the speaker has made a counter-journey to his, from Harar to London via France):
‘I am a transient, not-too-downtrodden inhabitant of a metropolis assumed up-to-date because every criterion of taste has been disregarded as much in the architectural design of its office-blocks and new-builds as in the panopticon of its urban planning. ‘Monuments to superstition’ are subsumed within the retail-facades. Morals and discourses are reduced to binary codes. These millions of beings with no need to acknowledge each other’s existence conduct their educations, careers and retirements with such uniformity and lack of will that the duration of their lives is several times longer than accredited statisticians have found to be the case in ‘the Developing World’.
'Hence, from my fourth-floor window, I make out a new species of apparition jay-walking through the fetid exhaust-fumes these never-dark summer nights – a new breed of Furies haunting the benefit-hostels as squalid as in their home-lands, but everything for them is like this: Death, like a social-worker, removing an unwanted baby; Love an unaffordable marketing-ploy; the pretty one with a police-record, snivelling for a fix by the bins.’
(An adaptation of 'Villes' from 'Illuminations')
Monday, 7 February 2011
guest contributor: rob taylor
Ictus is very pleased to welcome a new piece of writing by Rob Taylor, a poet and musician based in Brighton; an insightful reading of Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a novel notoriously difficult to gain a critical angle on. It's the first of what will hopefully turn out to be a regular series of contributions from guest-writers this year, so the blog is not just me wittering on:
'Heightened-State Micro-Obsessiveness':
Reflections on Infinite Jest
Capitalism and the Novel have grown up together. For 300 or so years the development of the one has been variously and suggestively mirrored in the other. But where Capital subsumes, homogenises and reifies, the best novels are able, momentarily at least, to awaken the multiple transgressive energies, meanings and divergences within human consciousness which the mechanisms of hegemony rigorously function to expunge and conceal. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is an incredibly apposite and percipient exploration of the pathologies at once the by product and life blood of our current phase of pervasive global Capital. The novel’s consubstantial trinity of themes – obsession, compulsion, addiction – are tackled with what is itself a kind of heightened-state micro-obsessiveness resulting in some of the finest comedic writing ever conceived. Conversely, the very same aspect of the book also produces some deliberately trying passages of maniacally convoluted detail and tangential prolixity designed to test the endurance of the hardiest reader in much the same way as the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Ulysses or Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale. Extensive footnotes function as a sort of anti-narrator frequently sending you to the back of the book for lengthy digressions of anything up to nineteen pages of tiny print itself smattered with microscopic sub-footnotes.
From a subtly different yet closely related entry-point it is equally a book about loneliness, loss, disconnectedness and the longing for human contact these precipitate. Beneath the broadly comic satire and intermittent brushes with nihilism there is compassion and a sense of ineffable sadness for human failure and frailty.
It is a huge novel: experientially vast, with frequent supple narrative shifts adapting proteanly to the various characters and their environments. As with the narrative strategy of Joyce, there is no neutral or default narrative voice from which the plurality of idiomatic registers depart. Infinite Jest consistently employs what is, as Hugh Kenner first noted, a characteristically Joycean approach to narrative; that the consciousness of the nearest presiding character inflects the rhythm, diction and ideological complexion of a sentence at any given point in the book. This is made nicely explicit when the hospitalised and delirious Gately, having been phantasmagorically visited by James Incandenza’s ‘wraith’ , finds his mind inundated with words which are entirely unknown to him:
‘..with roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn’t have any idea what it means and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape.’
This passage also points up the way in which socially and culturally disparate characters are in fact very close in terms of their experential malaise and are ironically connected through the very isolation of their various solitary compulsions. The twin axes at the novel’s centre, Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, both encapsulate a boundlessly lonely emptiness. Judged by the criteria of ‘the American Dream’ they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum of achievement and prestige but both symbolise equally, the impossibility of attaining, let alone maintaining, the imagined point of fulfilment. Both sets of inmates are just as in thrall to the chimerae of consumer-culture’s hollow drives; their shared nexus an agonisingly single-minded will to self-transcendence and annihilation. Thanatos and Eros are locked in a perpetual, tormented dance for which Incandenza’s ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ might provide an apt embodiment. The dialectic of ‘pleasure’ in a consumption-driven capitalist monoculture lies at the heart of Infinite Jest. What at first may seem diametrically opposed turn out to be two sides of the same desolate moon, as, indeed, the author of Hamlet who supplies the book’s title often demonstrated when dramatising his own anxieties toward a then just-emergent capitalist culture.
Infinite Jest contains some of the most haunting, funniest and uncannily exact prose you could hope to encounter. It’s bawdily humane, prodigiously generous in its refusal to pass judgement on the self-inflicted sufferings of its characters. It’s anarchically form-defying, ever-shifting vastness - is, finally, its own ungraspable form. The bathetic tailing-off of its many plot-strands seems at once inevitable and unsatisfactory but really it would be fatuous to expect some kind of denouement or plot resolution from an ‘entertainment’ such as this one. It is the bastard offspring of Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick midwifed by Gravity’s Rainbow and at the same time nothing at all like any of them or any other contemporary novel. In a literary culture that has still perhaps yet to recover from Foster Wallace's staggeringly untimely death by suicide in 2008, we are equally yet to measure the full importance of this seismic, gargantuan anti-epic, whose dystopic fictional future (conjectured back in the early 90's) seems uncomfortably near to where we are now.
 |
| DFW, not Rob Taylor! |
Reflections on Infinite Jest
Capitalism and the Novel have grown up together. For 300 or so years the development of the one has been variously and suggestively mirrored in the other. But where Capital subsumes, homogenises and reifies, the best novels are able, momentarily at least, to awaken the multiple transgressive energies, meanings and divergences within human consciousness which the mechanisms of hegemony rigorously function to expunge and conceal. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is an incredibly apposite and percipient exploration of the pathologies at once the by product and life blood of our current phase of pervasive global Capital. The novel’s consubstantial trinity of themes – obsession, compulsion, addiction – are tackled with what is itself a kind of heightened-state micro-obsessiveness resulting in some of the finest comedic writing ever conceived. Conversely, the very same aspect of the book also produces some deliberately trying passages of maniacally convoluted detail and tangential prolixity designed to test the endurance of the hardiest reader in much the same way as the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Ulysses or Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale. Extensive footnotes function as a sort of anti-narrator frequently sending you to the back of the book for lengthy digressions of anything up to nineteen pages of tiny print itself smattered with microscopic sub-footnotes.
From a subtly different yet closely related entry-point it is equally a book about loneliness, loss, disconnectedness and the longing for human contact these precipitate. Beneath the broadly comic satire and intermittent brushes with nihilism there is compassion and a sense of ineffable sadness for human failure and frailty.
It is a huge novel: experientially vast, with frequent supple narrative shifts adapting proteanly to the various characters and their environments. As with the narrative strategy of Joyce, there is no neutral or default narrative voice from which the plurality of idiomatic registers depart. Infinite Jest consistently employs what is, as Hugh Kenner first noted, a characteristically Joycean approach to narrative; that the consciousness of the nearest presiding character inflects the rhythm, diction and ideological complexion of a sentence at any given point in the book. This is made nicely explicit when the hospitalised and delirious Gately, having been phantasmagorically visited by James Incandenza’s ‘wraith’ , finds his mind inundated with words which are entirely unknown to him:
‘..with roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn’t have any idea what it means and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape.’
This passage also points up the way in which socially and culturally disparate characters are in fact very close in terms of their experential malaise and are ironically connected through the very isolation of their various solitary compulsions. The twin axes at the novel’s centre, Enfield Tennis Academy and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, both encapsulate a boundlessly lonely emptiness. Judged by the criteria of ‘the American Dream’ they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum of achievement and prestige but both symbolise equally, the impossibility of attaining, let alone maintaining, the imagined point of fulfilment. Both sets of inmates are just as in thrall to the chimerae of consumer-culture’s hollow drives; their shared nexus an agonisingly single-minded will to self-transcendence and annihilation. Thanatos and Eros are locked in a perpetual, tormented dance for which Incandenza’s ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ might provide an apt embodiment. The dialectic of ‘pleasure’ in a consumption-driven capitalist monoculture lies at the heart of Infinite Jest. What at first may seem diametrically opposed turn out to be two sides of the same desolate moon, as, indeed, the author of Hamlet who supplies the book’s title often demonstrated when dramatising his own anxieties toward a then just-emergent capitalist culture.
Infinite Jest contains some of the most haunting, funniest and uncannily exact prose you could hope to encounter. It’s bawdily humane, prodigiously generous in its refusal to pass judgement on the self-inflicted sufferings of its characters. It’s anarchically form-defying, ever-shifting vastness - is, finally, its own ungraspable form. The bathetic tailing-off of its many plot-strands seems at once inevitable and unsatisfactory but really it would be fatuous to expect some kind of denouement or plot resolution from an ‘entertainment’ such as this one. It is the bastard offspring of Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick midwifed by Gravity’s Rainbow and at the same time nothing at all like any of them or any other contemporary novel. In a literary culture that has still perhaps yet to recover from Foster Wallace's staggeringly untimely death by suicide in 2008, we are equally yet to measure the full importance of this seismic, gargantuan anti-epic, whose dystopic fictional future (conjectured back in the early 90's) seems uncomfortably near to where we are now.
Friday, 4 February 2011
marks of weakness, marks of woe
I recently began working at Hackney Community College in the to me unexplored locale of Shoreditch. Tipped off by a reference in Iain Sinclair's Edge of the Orison (of which more presently...) and bored of the office one lunchtime last week, I psychogeographised my way to Bunhill Fields just off Old Street roundabout and stumbled upon the resting-place of William Blake, a humbly unadorned grave set in fitting isolation amid the flagstones.
It was poignant to find such a maverick,recalcitrant master lodged in this little dissenters' cemetery surrounded now by glassy office-blocks, panini-bars, cybercafes and Pret a Mangers, this buzzing, 'happening' district momentarily stilled by the spectacle of a memorial stone dedicated to a poet who believed so passionately in the eternal.
"I wander through the charter'd streets
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark on every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe"
Sunday, 30 January 2011
'poetry rocks!'
Heartening article by Jackie Kay celebrating an apparent 'poetry renaissance' in the UK. Could it be (using Auden's terms) that this increasingly mad England under the Coalition is "hurting us into poetry" - something authentic, hand-crafted and unquantifiable "where executives would never want to tamper"?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/29/poets-poetry-stage-roar-renaissance
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/29/poets-poetry-stage-roar-renaissance
Sunday, 23 January 2011
spatchcock
Marvellously sensuous/sensual new poem from David Harsent, undoubtedly one of the best living English poets; a good example of how over a long career he's developed a voice, register and rhythm very much his own and with no obvious antecedents (distant traces of both Lawrence and Hughes in this one, perhaps.)
broadcast loss
Just read that Trish Keenan of Broadcast died of pneumonia a week ago at the absurdly young age of 42. They were an important band, precursors of what has recently been called 'hypnagogic pop', and her plaintive vocals were always an integral element of their appeal.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
lost voices
Interesting programme about Afghani poetry on Radio 4 today, including poignant invective against both the Taliban fundamentalists who suppressed all creative arts during their time in power (despite the extremely rich history of poetry within Islamic culture) and the US/British forces currently stamping their neo-colonialist mark on this beleaguered, belittled country:
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00xgswb/Lost_Voices_of_Afghanistan
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)