I’ve been to the opera, but I can’t post about it today: I’m off to Dickens World!
Never mind that the books tackle child exploitation, poverty, murder and domestic violence; the indoor attraction is based on designs by the creator of Santa World in Sweden so the emphasis is firmly on fun, fun, fun.Dickens World feels like Disney gone to the dark side. In place of the Magic Kingdom there is Newgate Prison; instead of talking animals there will be shady characters loitering in dark corners. Although the attractions are all faithfully Dickensian, the larks are very much 21st century….The whole project cost £62m and hopes to present Dickens to coaches of schoolchildren without having to call in the Muppets for backup.
It’s all within a day-trip from my house, apparently.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Stupidity, Writing by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Monday 16 April 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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The Kurt Vonnegut post
Thursday 12 April 2007
I was just invoking Kurt Vonnegut’s depiction of an arsehole to describe a photograph when I heard that he had died. Tim Sterne at Sarsaparilla has posted a brief farewell.
Crud Crud has posted an mp3 of an old LP of Vonnegut reading excerpts from Cat’s Cradle.
Filed under: Writing by Ben.H
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Literary Stowaways of the Antipodes
Thursday 12 April 2007
The parlor game – which books for a desert island? – was played by America in earnest. Homer’s book was not just there, as in London or Leyden; one decided to bring it along, or send for it, or decided not to.– Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era.
After discussing what Australian authors didn’t make the trip to London, I made a quick survey of the ones that did. This seems to be just about everything:
- Obviously I like the more experimental poets: Ania Walwicz, Jas Duke, Chris Mann, ΠO, and several issues of 925 are all present and correct.
- Some other small zines (see photo).
- A little history: Michael Cathcart’s abridgement of Manning Clark, Ann Coombs’ Sex and Anarchy, a history of the Sydney Push.
- Meaghan Morris’ Ecstasy and Economics, along with John Forbes’ New and Selected Poems and a “self-pirated” collection titled Humidity (“I’ll probably change the title to The Banquet of Cleopatra.”)
- 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, The Pink Violin, and Violin Music in the Age of Shopping.
- More history: The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, Bruce Petty’s Australia and how it works.
- Noel Stock’s biography of Ezra Pound, written during his transition from being one of Pound ‘s defenders to one of his detractors.
- Fiction: Patrick White (Voss, Riders, Vivisector, Storm, Leaves, Twyborn, Three Uneasy Pieces), some Mary Fallon/Fallin, a David Brooks (The House of Balthus) I know nothing about but picked up for a dollar shotly before leaving, a slim volume of Henry Lawson (“The Union Buries Its Dead” etc), and… where’s the rest of it?
Filed under: Writing by Ben.H
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Not Wanted on Voyage: Further Perils of Categorisation
Tuesday 10 April 2007
After reading about Elizabeth Jolley’s death, I went to my shelves to take another look through some of her books, and couldn’t find them. The organisation of my books had been hasty and haphazard since unpacking them last year, when they finally arrived in my London flat a little over a year after I left Melbourne. Besides the confusion on the bookshelves, an unknown number of books remained squirrelled away in a tower of unexplored boxes stacked in the hallway.
A month ago on Sarsaparilla, Sophie wrote about the complications of trying to organise her bookshelves for the first time after moving house. I was unable to comment at the time, as I was preoccupied with moving house myself, but was very interested to read what others had to say about bringing some order to their bookpiles, to see what I could learn. However, none of the solutions that worked for other people offered a viable alternative to the method I have adopted in the last few years. What’s more, Sophie’s question about whether she was ghettoising the Australian books in her library went largely unanswered.
I used to prefer straight alphabetisation by author, without further categorisation, to avoid the problem of overlapping and conflicting categories that so many others have mentioned. This, however, led to two problems which I found sufficiently annoying to cause me to abandon the system altogether. Both of these problems were consequences of the logical rigidity demanded by this system.
Firstly, the alphabet would dictate that books be placed on shelves too small to fit them, forcing them to be shelved perpendicularly or out of sequence on a more generously sized shelf. This is a particular problem for people with bookshelves of a fixed height, such as those older bookcases designed for a collection of Penguins and the Everyman Library, ill equipped to accommodate the influx of remaindered titles from American publishers. The problem is especially vexing when an outsize book is orphaned from companion volumes by the same author (see fig. 1).
Figure 1: Published titles by the same author can vary widely in size, as demonstrated here by Charles Olson’s Maximus and Causal Mythology. The Kit Kat is included for scale.
The second problem is that alphabetical order disregards the location of the most frequently consulted books where they are most readily accessible, being as likely to happen as not (see fig. 2). Woe betide the Walter Abish scholar of short stature with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a love of alphabetisation; likewise lament the plus-sized Louis Zukofsky buff with a need for order.
Figure 2: Predicted location of the most frequently consulted books in a collection (Stephen Potter, Ezra Pound) sorted alphabetically by author in a six-shelf bookcase one metre wide, or multiples thereof.
In the end, I abandoned any pretense of an objective, consistent system and grouped books together by the regularity with which I consult them. Or would like to think I consult them, at any rate. Basically, the position of a book on my shelves is a rough measure of the esteem in which I currently hold it.
Because my interests focus upon modernists and postmodernists, the middle shelves are given over to books by or about Ezra Pound – sheer numbers make this the default point of origin. Everything else radiates out from this central plank: Wyndham Lewis on a shelf immediately above or below, through Pound’s contemporaries and heirs to Charles Olson, and from there on to the postmodernists. John Cage, William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Kathy Acker form a loose alliance of convenience on the upper and lower shelves.
Stray individuals are slotted in to fit available space, grouped by subjective affinities. Laurence Sterne, Sei Shōnagon, Velimir Khlebnikov and Konrad Bayer all share favourable placement thanks to their exploration of the nature of writing. Banished to the least accessible heights and depths are the occasional Dickens and Rushdie, ancient Romans, renaissance Italians, and a surprisingly large number (more than two!) of French existentialists and surrealists.
For what it’s worth, the Australians were always mixed in with everybody else as though they had every right to belong there. This was partly to uphold the noble idea of a global village, but more honestly to hide my suspicion that the Australian section would look embarrassingly small by comparison. In turn, this would have goaded me into buying a number of books by Australian authors I could never bring myself to read.
So, after all the boxes were finally unpacked, on which shelf did I end up putting those Elizabeth Jolley novels? Nowhere, as it turned out. Jolley wasn’t there. Or rather, she had been relegated to the books left in storage in Melbourne. This may have been an accident or oversight, but seeing as all my most important books are over here, and that I hadn’t missed her until now, it looks like I made a conscious decision to leave her books behind.
Jolley is by no means alone. Now that I rack my brains to think what else is missing, I realise my library lacks some of the less helpful books about Pound, still more French existentialists, plenty of remaindered Viragos (don’t we all have those hidden somewhere?), and Australians. Peter Carey and Andrew McGahan didn’t make the cut, for instance. Patrick White did, but this seems to be more out of guilt than enthusiasm.
As a pack rat by nature, I probably knew in the back of my mind as I was marking the boxes that I would regret the decision sooner or later, but why did I make these particular choices at the time? My guess is that I had created a virtual shelf in my head, one further remove from the epicentre of Pound, Stein, Joyce et al, whose books were deemed excessive to travel and were placed in a storage crate. The distance to that last shelf is a little too great, and now I regret my mistake of banishing at least Miss Peabody’s Inheritance to the Big Shelf Down Under.
(Crossposted at Sarsaparilla.)
Filed under: The Bunker, Writing by Ben.H
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Sol LeWitt died on Sunday
Monday 9 April 2007
I learned about Sol LeWitt’s art at about the same time I first heard Philip Glass‘ music, which was appropriate given that the two worked together on several occasions in the 1970s (the photo above is from his cover design for Glass’ LP Music in 12 Parts, Parts 1 & 2).
The New York Times has an obituary (use Bugmenot if you’re asked to register) which attempts to explain the appeal of his drawings which were conceived as simple sets of instructions for someone else to execute:
Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results…. he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others — their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever — remained part of the art.
This doesn’t really capture the real impression these drawings first made on me: the realisation that a work of visual art could be made, and appreciated, in the same way as a piece of music. The plans simultaneously governed the form and determined the detail of the finished drawing, and the finished interpretation could be enjoyed for the individual nuances contained within the realisation of an abstract concept. (This also means I don’t care how joyous or bored those assistants were.)
Crown Point Press has a selection of LeWitt’s prints reproduced online. You can read LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art or, if you prefer, have John Baldessari sing them for you.
Filed under: Art by Ben.H
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This Is It! This is the New Music! Again. More Stained Melodies
Monday 2 April 2007
I’ve finally gotten around to uploading some more mp3s of my music. Everything I’ve been working on lately is pretty long, so here are some shorter pieces written over the past few years that I can still stand to listen to.
The two new additions are from a series of 24 piano pieces called Stained Melodies. The material for Stained Melodies was selected through the use of chance operations on a large array of MIDI keyboard works freely available on the internet. Rather than make a conventional collage, these pieces take only one kind of pitch from each selected work, all of which are then played back simultaneously. In effect, each melody is a collaboration between numerous ghost pianists, none of whom can hear each other; the majority of their music erased. A more detailed explanation is on the download page.
This set of pieces is quite likely impossible for a human pianist to play. To put it beyond any doubt, several additional adjustments were made to take advantage of a computer realization. Dynamics change abruptly from one note to the next, and the sustain pedal only works for the least occurring notes in each piece. Finally, the tuning was modified so that the piano retunes itself in each piece to suit the harmonic qualities of the most frequently occurring note.
At the moment, only Nos. 2, 12, and 18 are available for download: they’re about 3MB each. Two other, later works are available on the main music page. Comments are welcome and may be concise as, but not necessarily limited to:
- A: Love it.
- B: Hate it.
- C: Downloaded it and swear to god I’ll getting around to listening to it right after I get over the mp3s of that album Björk recorded when she was four years old or something.
- D: You’ve linked everything to a folder on your C drive, numbnuts!
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Sunday 1 April 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Tourists at the Gates of Hell!
Saturday 31 March 2007
Tourists at the Gates of Hell!
Tourists at the Gates of Hell!
And what evil lurks behind the Gates of Hell?
A bloke eating crisps.
Filed under: Art, London by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy XLVIII: The Right Kind of Pain
Wednesday 28 March 2007
Mark Greif in the London Review of Books sums up the inadequacy of most popular music criticism when it comes to addressing the genre’s unique qualities, and its unique illusions:
This sort of writing fails the reality of pop: its special alchemy of lyrics that look like junk on the page, and music that seems underdeveloped when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling Stone-ism, the gonzo rock journalist who thinks he is a rock star. Perhaps worst of all, there is the curse of the rhetoric of social action and ‘revolution’, a faith-based illusion that pop songs clearly manifest social history, or an exaggerated sense of what pop achieves in the world. In truth, most critics aren’t verbally equipped to describe any band’s vivid effects on its main audience: the listener at home, alone in his room.
You could argue against that last point, but the reality of recording as pop music’s medium (and rock’s, if you are particular about these distinctions) is inescapable in Grief’s review of Richard Witts’ book on The Velvet Underground. Combined, the two writers reveal the band as something quite different from the quasi-mythical beast it has become in popular imagination, and discover the band’s secret twin on the other side of the continent…
Also: The Velvet Underground, as Doug Yule saw it.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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Someone please reassure me I didn’t dream this
Tuesday 27 March 2007
When finishing up the previous post (which had sat around unfinished for weeks, poor thing) I got to the bit about where artists’ ideas come from and remembered an anecdote I think I heard on the radio about 20 years ago, but have never encountered since.
Igor Stravinsky, when asked what he was thinking of while composing The Rite of Spring, once replied* “Fresh air and cheese, plus a lot of electricity.”
Incidentally, googling stravinsky +air +cheese +electricity will take you to a bunch of Frank Zappa sites.
* Allegedly! i.e. according to me.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Stockhausen, Sirius, and Self-Belief
Monday 26 March 2007
It’s the highfalutin’ equivalent of a fight breaking out on a football pitch: the premiere of Stockhausen’s Trans staggers to a halt amidst a chorus of hoots and hisses from the audience. Some incensed concertgoers jump the gun and unwittingly start booing before the end, quickly subdued by insistent shushing and the last, unexpected sounds of the orchestra. Once everyone’s certain it’s finally over, the crowd, impatient but still disorientated by the stop-start finish, rises in partisan crosstides of cheers and catcalls. For several minutes the two sides battle for supremacy, the boos and hisses drowned out by cheers, the cheers drowned out by boos and hisses – all of it preserved on the CD release, as though it were part of the music.
Edward Winkelman recently posted on his blog about the importance of self-belief in the arts, and whether all art is to some extent a game of confidence.
Reportedly, an influential Chelsea art dealer was asked once what characteristic she felt separated the artists who would feature prominently in the history books and those who would be lucky to be footnotes. Representing several who’ve already entered the history books, she responded that the ones who make it, wake up everyday, look themselves in the mirror, and say “I’m the best fucking artist in the world” before heading off to their studios.Mind you, the heading off to their studios is no small part of their success, but the belief in the importance of their work is something I’m beginning to believe might be crucial to that level of success as well….
If not arrogance, then at least wholesale delusion seems to be an asset. Stockhausen, a composer confident enough to instruct musicians when they were playing correctly in the rhythm of the universe, was asked sometime in the early seventies that chestnut dear to clueless journalists, “Where do you get your ideas?” Unexpectedly, he answered in all seriousness that all his music was dictated to him by his ancestral supreme beings from a planet in the Sirius star system. He then spent the next thirty years of his life writing a seven-day opera detailing his cosmological revelations.
Trans, however, is a piece so unusual that even Stockhausen himself is incapable of explaining it, saying merely that it came to him in a dream he could transcribe but not interpret. It doesn’t get played very often, so I made a point of going to see it at Blackheath Halls last month, where students from Trinity College were staging it as part of a new(ish) music festival.
The orchestra is directed to play from behind a scrim, bathed in dim purple light – Blackheath Halls doesn’t have a proscenium on its stage, so instead of the scrim they filled the room with fog. Three tiers of string players faced the audience; in the violet gloom behind them, rows of other musicians could vaguely be seen, following a conductor hidden behind a screen. The string players created a dense veil of sustained tones that masks the sounds that emerged from the stage behind them. Occasional, mysterious solos erupted from the orchestra, for no explicable reason. A loud, shuttling sound thundered across the room at unexpected intervals, as a random punctuation.
Audience and orchestra, equally lost in the purple fog, partook of the event in a state not unlike the suspension of disbelief required to embrace the enactment of a myth. Its alien weirdness and denial of rational meaning suspended judgement, the music and its theatre an unquestionable, unalterable fact to be experienced. We all deferred to the indomitable arrogance of Stockhausen, an arrogance that was necessary to trust that he could put across a work he could not understand, without a safety net of explanation or justification.
As a piece of theatrical irony, the student orchestra looked nervous and uncertain of their place on stage, as though overwhelmed by the audacity of the work and plagued by doubts that they could successfully pull it off. At the end of the piece many of them had a stunned expression of disbelief at their success. The music itself had been powerful enough to transcend their lack of self-possession, treating them as vessels, receiving dictation from higher beings.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Now in Lewisham unchained and living
Friday 23 March 2007
I’m finally back online, nicely settled in the new house. The new place has several amenities the old one lacked (trees, birds, grass, stars at night), but then there are some things the old place had which this house doesn’t offer (drug deals, street fighting, car wrecks, karaoke from the pub across the street at night).
A quick snapshot from the toilet of each residence should give an idea on how my lifestyle has improved. Before:
After:
Just to the right of this picture you can also see the Millennium Dome, but no matter.
Sadly, I suspect I’ll no longer be able to see all sorts of exciting things out my window anymore, like shootings, fistfights, and grisly death. On the other hand, the neighbours’ back yards may turn out to be more exciting than I imagine.
After two weeks it’s hard to get back into the habit of updating this site again, so expect to see some rather out-of-date posts for the next few days.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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Any Day Now
Monday 19 March 2007
“Normal” “service” will “resume” by the “end” of the “week”.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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House Moving! All Change.
Wednesday 7 March 2007
