Faces

Post-modern Language

The thing about the post-modern age we’re living in, and have been living in, for the past 30 years or so, is that we all want to see citations and references - -we want to see familiar images and hear familiar sounds.  We want movies to either have videobits or audiobits (clips from movies/music/TV we all remember ) and we use these as commonly and ubiquitously as words or even letters.  We live in an age of reproductions and copying and citing and so on - - we want familiarity in our entertainment and in our culture.  And these ‘bits’ operate no less and no more than letters  (or perhaps words) in an increasingly complex video/audio language; in some ways, the new language is quite logographic (writing system that often pairs visual image with sound-based characters).  In some ways, we are becoming more Chinese, if the logographic writing system has any influence on the culture – which McLuhan would, of course, strongly argue for.  (I feel like I’ve written this all before, curiously enough, at the end of University, I think).  Most young people feel the world is devoid of originality because so much of it is familiar and cliched.  But people never say the English language is cliched, or the English alphabet is unoriginal.  Everyone uses them, either words or letters, freely and we treat them as free and open to creative use, or even dull use – but no one ever says, “Oh, you used the word “the” again.  Get a life!  Say something original!  Have an original thought!”  We should treat the post-modern age we live in as the incipience of a new language, whether they take the form of words or individual letters remains to be seen, but it is a new language, more complicated by far than the poor alphabet or English language.  Our discomfort and cynicism with the world and artistic cultures, of the state of being unoriginal and totally incapable of originality, is childish and ignorant.  We are living in the age of Cadmus - -maybe that’s why I wanted to do a short movie based on the myth.  Anyways, quote freely and use the images of the culture as openly as one uses their own mother tongue. You are part of a revolution in language!

Drunken Mr. Thomas by Drunken Mr. Moore

Alan Moore

The night Dylan Thomas died, he bragged to his wife he had had 18 shots of alcohol in a row -- everything is a test of man-strength and man-constitution. But that’s alright.  (It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall of that pub that night; but I doubt the bar even had a little picture on the wall serendipitously celebrating his achievement. Maybe, though- a Turner, a landscape?)

Dylan Thomas

Here, here now! Prince Charles , with his protuberant ears, might say something of Turner, as the Prince dabbles in watercolour painting. 

Hmm, don’t believe Turner ever painted in watercolours.  No, there was no painting in the bar when Dylan Thomas entered, unphased.  .A head goes ahead however you mind it.  So he downed the dreadful elixir and did some more merciless damage to his inner worlds and his disease was blackness inside him, black, black, Bible-black; why kill himself? Mandela said about hate – it's like drinking poison to kill someone else. But what if the poison is to kill you, a big chunk of you, that the rest of you can't even tolerate?

He only wrote when he was drunk.   He died for writing, didn’t he?  Somehow, Dylan Thomas figures for me his way into a “graphic novel” I wrote, called “From Hell”. All about Jack the Ripper.  

We know the culprit early on, so the story isn’t so much about who did it, but more why the hell is he doing it, and gives us a glance into the mind of a psychopath.  But everywhere in the novel, do the English seem drunk and miserable; if you’re from the working class (or from Northampton, as I was), you know what they lived like.  I can’t imagine Dylan Thomas was a very happy man most of the time.  Even some of the time.  And so the murderees of “From Hell” too carry themselves about. As  D.H. Lawrence coined the term, a “murderee”  is someone who is almost born to be a victim - fodder for murder, with inherent weaknesses, useless martyrs,  killing themselves through a whole gamut of possible tortures; some liveable, some a kind of romance with death.  Dylan Thomas was a murderee, an Icarus; he 'drowned' dedicated in his bed, I guess; in his house, I suppose; in his underworld – hmm.

I wonder , Watchmen-esquely,

if Thomas would have made much of a post-modern superhero.  Some people would call him that already, the Welsh son, a great, sloshing poet.  He would probably be given wings, like an angel, but he would learn to use them eventually so well he could go off the cliffs of Dover, and find his way through the huffing of the spirits swimming in the air up there, before being rescued by his reason and bravery to return and set foot on the soft grass on the cliff-top. 

He, too, would travel to various engagements – where locals had gathered to hear him speak, even off the cuff; let him compose in place, follow where he was leading them, and before he got too sloshed, take to the air again and bust a hole in the nightsky,

destroy a spy satelite, (shards clattering down into the sea). And then he would die and sleep, to gain his strength and mind to face the trials and shots from the enemies/miracles below, him needing just a quarter of an hour to pace it out and turn over another gem and start them thinking, start to placate all the murderers, all of them, which lurk in everyone, everywhere, good or bad.  

A Nibblet of Tolstoy

A good writer is a subtle writer, as far as I can say.  The height of craft comes when the meaningful bits of the story express themselves subtlely, sometimes beneath detection.  So how is meaning made in a written piece of work?  Subtlely.  With super-advanced word-play, double meanings, suggestions of ideas and a form that hides the meaning at the service of the story.  (We’re talking “classical” writing here – more like Tolstoy than Joyce.)

For a long time, I’ve had difficulty watching movies as well as being part of the audience of any art on display, including reading books.  For me, the movies do it the best and the worst, and a close second is books. I refuse to get involved in movies I see.  I stay away from the identification with whatever main character there is on the silver screen because I don’t want to feel used.  That’s right.  I don’t want to be the puppet of the director’s amusement.  I refuse to let the film involve me too much. I don’t also like having to fill in the gaps where the movie strays from the proverbial tracks so to speak.  Acting in scenes irks me. If the actor is poor, then it’s hard for me to follow the scene and forgive the litany of woeful sloppiness’s in such bad scenes.  I figure – I’m paying them to entertain me.  Let them do their job!  I don’t want to lift a finger to help them with their little movie.  I refuse!   Also, I don’t want my mind screwed with.  I don’t want to ‘identify’ with some actor in a role on the screen.  My participation is reserved for films I like, which are rare.  In comes in the form of forgiveness for the film’s peccadillos. 

Does the same go for books?  Absolutely, but reading is more difficult than movie – even despite the fact that the same dude/dudette is responsible for everything in the book! Everything!   So, if dialogue is weak, he/she might redeem themselves in the form of kick-ass characterizations or beautiful descriptions.  But, also, my attention isn’t held every long unless the book is stone cold, especially a subtle writer, as mentioned above.  I’ll tell you one thing – Elmore Leonard is pretty much as good as Ernest Hemingway in my books, better than Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hellmett anyday and anyway.  But however great they are, they don’t approach the work of Lev Tolstoy.

I think, I feel, I should express here what I think of a passage of really great writing, to show you what I mean (assuming you’re interested!) What I’d like to do is illustrate why Tolstoy is such a good writer.  “Anna Karenina”, then.  The first paragraph on the first page of the book starts like this:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

An epigram starts things off;  the mind fairly reeling,  as the statement leaves one a little confused.  First off,  we also find the house full of confusion.  Why both? Is there a connection? Yes! The state of the house is the state of the reader’s mind right then.  Even for the rest of the paragraph, Tolstoy keeps the activity reeling along, Tolstoy neatly elaborating on the initial epigram, about “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We are bombarded with details, a flurry of activity, the wild and stranded unhappy family living in the midst of its unhappiness.

And the details keep arriving, and we find ourselves convinced of the negative side of the epigram.  Man and woman pairs come up, and through this pairedness they all represent the husband and wife, from different angles, as it were.  In fact it ends on a pair, a coachman and a kitchen-maid.  The  pairedness of the kitchen-maid and coachman carries over, reiterates the “marriage problem”  - infidelity – and we remember the initial mention of the marriage problem and the problems it carries, from the house workers  to the Oblonskys.   

But there is also the need to move on, here nearing the end of the paragraph. To move on from the epigram, and the epigrammatic first paragraph, to move on to the prose rest of the novel -  as sounded in - “ the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her.”  Prominent for me here is the fact that she is a “housekeeper”, which connotes “house” immediately, which brings to mind the problems of the Oblonskys.  We shift the house now from the details of the problems besetting the house, to a “new situation”, and this calls for a shift in perspective in the story, but not too radical a change  - there is a English governess who brings to mind, in her station alone, the French governess, with whom the husband Oblonsky had his affair.  This resonance between governesses carries into the mention of the quarrel with the housekeeper (connoting “house”)  The governess has a problem with the house (again the French, by association, problems with the house as it is). And the governess is looking for a new position.  It is fairly safe to assume Tolstoy is dragging the French Governess out of the limelight, to some extent even out of most of the novel.   We bring back the focus to husband and wife Oblonsky, and being a female leaving the house, then we must expect a male counterpart, “the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time”.  And then those glancing meanings are picked up and added to by the pair of the last sentence “the kitchen-maid and the coachman had given warning”.  The stress of the sentence hangs on the last sentence there and it carries a lot of strength, like an amber traffic light. A warning to forget what you’ve heard, to have been informed through the purist grapevine channels.  It also, not as much as a red light, so to speak, but does signal an ending, and puts one’s mind to rest over the whole preceding paragraph.  We are moving on, we are turning away, we feel the strings pulling our limbs but we slacken backwards at the lightest loosening of line - -we are in the proverbial hands of a Master, and we will trust ourselves in his Hands.

  

Surveillance:Klepto

The Greatest Horror

At the moment of conception, we found ourselves first confronted with the monstrous inevitability of becoming Physical–  we were expelled from our world and forcibly joined the alien Flesh; and we knew the horror of sin,  briefly, before we went on to know nothing of the past horror; and we came to feel the nervous impulses running throughout our bodies and think they were the utter extent of our being; and we happily shocked our little souls everyday; and we knew the dread of Nothingness;  of the Death, Electric.

Every day

Every day, everyday, I find the very planet beneath me trembling from the laughter of the electrons.