#but then I started thinking about how precise and poetic his communication style is and how it clashes with Harry’s.

[bookwormangie]

Harry and Snape’s Clashing Communication Styles

It's interesting to think that Harry and Snape don’t have longer conversations in the series, but when they do, their communication styles are so different that they often clash.

Harry’s way of communicating is practical and straightforward. He tends to break down complex ideas into simpler terms that he can easily understand. This makes sense, given his upbringing in a non-magical world and his tendency to rely more on gut instinct than deep theoretical knowledge. For Harry, things are usually black and white, and his directness shows his desire to cut through the confusion and get straight to the point.

Snape, on the other hand, has a more complex and layered way of speaking. His language is precise and often sarcastic, which reflects not just his intelligence but also his disdain for what he sees as Harry’s lack of subtlety. Snape’s use of imagery and metaphor, especially when he describes consepts, gives his speech a poetic, almost philosophical quality. He takes pleasure in showing off his superior knowledge and uses this as a way to belittle Harry.

We see this clash clearly in OOTP during Harry’s first Occlumency lesson:

Snape looked back at him for a moment and then said contemptuously, “Surely even you could have worked that out by now, Potter? The Dark Lord is highly skilled at Legilimency —” “What’s that? Sir?” “It is the ability to extract feelings and memories from another person’s mind —” “He can read minds?” said Harry quickly, his worst fears confirmed. “You have no subtlety, Potter,” said Snape, his dark eyes glittering. “You do not understand fine distinctions. It is one of the shortcomings that makes you such a lamentable potion-maker.” Snape paused for a moment, apparently to savor the pleasure of insulting Harry, before continuing, “Only Muggles talk of ‘mind reading.’ The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter . . . or at least, most minds are. . . .” He smirked. Whatever Snape said, Legilimency sounded like mind reading to Harry and he did not like the sound of it at all.

For Harry, when Snape mentions Legilimency, it immediately sounds like “mind reading,” which is a reasonable but overly simple way to understand such a complex concept. His quick jump to this conclusion shows his need to make sense of something that feels threatening, but it also reveals his limited grasp of the deeper nuances.

Snape, however, can’t resist mocking Harry’s lack of subtlety. His response is laced with condescension as he insists on the complexity of the mind and dismisses the idea of “mind reading” as something only muggles would think of. Snape’s explanation is detailed and philosophical, contrasting sharply with Harry’s desire for a straightforward answer.

Another great example of their different communication styles comes in HBP when Snape puts Harry on the spot, asking him to explain the difference between an inferius and a ghost:

“Let us ask Potter how we would tell the difference between an Inferius and a ghost.” The whole class looked around at Harry, who hastily tried to recall what Dumbledore had told him the night that they had gone to visit Slughorn. “Er — well — ghosts are transparent —” he said. “Oh, very good,” interrupted Snape, his lip curling. “Yes, it is easy to see that nearly six years of magical education have not been wasted on you, Potter. ‘Ghosts are transparent.’ ” Harry took a deep breath and continued calmly, though his insides were boiling, “Yeah, ghosts are transparent, but Inferi are dead bodies, aren’t they? So they’d be solid —” “A five-year-old could have told us as much,” sneered Snape. “The Inferius is a corpse that has been reanimated by a Dark wizard’s spells. It is not alive, it is merely used like a puppet to do the wizard’s bidding. A ghost, as I trust that you are all aware by now, is the imprint of a departed soul left upon the earth . . . and of course, as Potter so wisely tells us, transparent.” “Well, what Harry said is the most useful if we’re trying to tell them apart!” said Ron. “When we come face-to-face with one down a dark alley, we’re going to be having a shufti to see if it’s solid, aren’t we, we’re not going to be asking, ‘Excuse me, are you the imprint of a departed soul?’

Once again, Harry demonstrates his practical and straightforward approach. He gives a simple, clear distinction based on what would be most useful in a real-life situation—whether the entity is solid or transparent. This shows how Harry tends to focus on what’s immediately relevant and actionable, and Ron’s defense of Harry’s answer highlights this practicality. Ron even points out that in a real-world scenario, Harry’s answer is actually the most helpful, contrasting it with Snape’s more academic approach.

Snape, though, dismisses Harry’s answer as too simplistic and mocks him for stating what he sees as the obvious. Snape’s communication is more about the theoretical and precise understanding of magical concepts. He emphasizes the deeper, more complex nature of an Inferius, which, while academically accurate, is less practical in the context that Harry is thinking of. Snape’s disdain shows that he values this deeper, nuanced understanding more than the direct, practical knowledge that Harry offers.

These moments really bring out the deeper divide between Harry and Snape. Harry approaches things with instinct and a straightforward mindset, while Snape is all about nuance, precision, and seeing the layers in everything. Because they see the world so differently, they struggle to communicate, which only adds to the distrust and misunderstanding between them—a tension that echoes throughout the entire series.

[alwaysalreadyangry]

most of the UK reviews i’ve read of martin eden have been a disappointment, tbh. i don’t know if this is because critics have been busy with cannes or because outlets here just don’t have the space, or because it’s kind of seen as old news. i have seen no real engagement with the politics or form beyond a couple of cursory lines, and it’s a shame because... i think it’s really rich wrt those elements?

so i am looking again at the (wonderful) review from film comment last year and it’s such a shame that it’s not available freely online. so i thought i’d post it here behind a cut. it’s long but worth it imo (and also engages really interestingly with marcello’s other films). it’s by phoebe chen.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS              Jan  3, 2020                    BY PHOEBE CHEN

EARLY IN JACK LONDON’S 1909 NOVEL MARTIN EDEN, there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chromos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a centuries-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion. These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass production. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character, a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of archival unconscious.

This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Crossing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the country, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after 20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.

Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism, marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral. And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archival sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove, much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distressing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts with sudden incongruity, as in a cut to dockworkers filmed in black and white, their faces and hands painted in uncanny approximations of living complexions. Other transitions are so precisely matched to color and texture that they seem extensions of a dream.

Martin’s writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and ecological hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression. In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-mindedness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).

Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story. Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shifting measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,” writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin understands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for education and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish. Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy: “I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant, enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been amplified to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected manuscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.

WITH SUCH A DEEPLY INHABITED PERFORMANCE by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as a character study, but the lyrical interiority of London’s novel never feels like the point of Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illustrate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two children dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy. These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.

But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crystalline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by London’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a systematic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon, Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.

In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught function as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who transmigrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean, a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to mark the changing conditions of a new century.

Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep, as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and the people all clung / to it tightly.”

Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.

[itsclydebitches]

You all want to hear a shocking secret? I’m still writing these 😅 

Drabble #3 for @valasania-the-pale! 

Reckless Conversation 

Pairing: Future Geralt/Dandelion with pining Dandelion and references to other ships

Word Count: 3,581

How'd it go? Geralt would ask, head bent over his blade like he wasn't hanging on Ciri's every word. 

I think I broke Dandelion's nose should produce a fun reaction. 

That was an enjoyment only future Ciri had access to though. Right now, present Ciri had to deal with the damn thing. 

"It's not that bad," she insisted, even as blood soaked through the rag she'd given him. She winced as Dandelion all but stuffed the material up his nostrils in an effort to stop the flow. Ciri was pretty sure she'd last used that to mop up some drowner slime... best not mention it. Besides, it wasn’t like he was breathing through his nose right now. "It's fine. You're fine." 

"I'd like to be the judge of that!" came the muffled reply. Dandelion staggered to a nearby water trough, blinking down at his own reflection. When he straightened his face was curiously blank. "You've ruined me." 

"Oh please." 

"I'm done. Through. My career will never recover. I hope it was worth it, little miss witcher, I really do." 

"Okay, first of all you're fine. Second, I doubt a bruised nose will hinder your poetry—" 

"I am speaking of my romantic career, dear, keep up!" 

Ciri rolled her eyes to the heavens, half hoping they'd open up and drown her. Dandelion had dropped plaintively to his knees, staring into the water and bemoaning his bloodstained shirt. She bit down on the urge to point out the new mud on his trousers. 

"Maybe," she said, rocking back on her heels, "you shouldn't go grabbing little miss witchers from the depths of alleyways. They have a tendency to hit first and ask questions later." 

The glare didn't surprise her. The words though... 

"Well, I was happy to see you." 

Oh. 

Shaking her head, Ciri pulled Dandelion to his feet and straight into a hug. "And I'm happy to see you too. Drama and all." 

The sounds emanating from her shoulder were curiously wet, though whether that was due to injury or emotion she couldn't say. "Friends pay for ruined clothes, you know." 

"Not when one friend has a monopoly on Novigrad's entertainment district and the other barely has two coins to her name. Plus, I'm pretty sure one of them is counterfeit. I owe someone else a broken nose. Sorry you got it instead." 

With a laugh Dandelion pulled away. "In truth I'm happy to receive anything you might give me, Ciri. Though I'd really prefer a strong drink." 

"I think we can manage that." 

After checking that his nose truly wasn't broken — just blooming a display of color that would put many painters to shame — Dandelion took Ciri's hand and led her into the city. He wasn't a native, but he might as well have been given the number of years he'd spent here, moving between high society circles and dangerous slums. Ciri knew there were few who could show her Novigrad like Dandelion and after months on the Path she was more than happy to let someone else call the shots for a while. 

She shouldn't have been surprised when, just minutes later, she was steered into a small alcove, the entrance so dark even she might have missed it passing by. An elf stood off to the side of a door, the bulk of his arms contrasting the ornamentally styled tunic. He inclined his head towards Dandelion as they slipped inside. 

"Milireth," he whispered, though the sudden onslaught of chatter made that unnecessary. "Great chap. Bit taciturn for my taste, but then I have plenty of stirring conversation for the two of us. He had some trouble finding employment a while back — you know how inhumane those Eternal Fire folks are and yes, I use that term deliberately — so I called in a favor with Julia and got him a spot here. Perfect fit. Now Milireth, in turn, lets me in without Julia being any wiser." He dropped her a wink. 

"Dandelion. Are we going to get kicked out halfway through our drinks?" 

"Absolutely not. Probably not. Provided we keep to the back. Or provided Julia has gotten over her most recent grudge. Either way I'd consider those excellent odds. Come on!" 

He led her through the establishment with impressive skill, weaving among the closely packed tables, dodging feet and legs. As Ciri's eyes adjusted to the low light she realized why Milireth was a good fit for this place. While Novigrad tended to divide its species rather strictly by districts and boroughs, here there was a diverse mix Ciri had only ever seen among her own friends and family. Dwarves, humans, elves, and, she suspected, a doppler or two made up the majority of the crowd, largely keeping to their own tables but still intermingling to an almost unheard of degree. They were literally sharing elbow room, leaning into one another's space with a confidence that said here, at least, everyone was welcome. A figure all the way in the back was shrouded in their cloak, but claw-like hands brought a mug to their lips. A woman with slit eyes smiled as they passed. Another was giving off pheromones — if the men draped in her lap were any indication. Monsters of all manner took refuge in shadows, fortifying themselves with good food, better drink, and even, if any would admit it, the company. 

Dandelion gently pushed Ciri into an empty seat. Her legs felt loose as a water hag's stew. 

"What — ?" she started to say before realizing that she knew precisely what this place was. Ciri shook her head. No one liked stupid questions. "How does this place exist?" 

Dandelion waved a hand. "Well, the philosopher might spout something about life finding a way, no matter what might stand against it. The Captain of our guard would say that the scum of the city are unerringly skilled at meeting in clandestine places. I suppose that both are right in their own way. Me? I might wax poetic about the stunningly skillful enchantments that keep this place from prying eyes." 

Ciri's gaze dropped instinctively to the Cat medallion against her chest. It lay quiet as a grave. Well, a grave post-witcher contract. 

"Very sophisticated enchantments," Dandelion said. 

"I'll say. I'm surprised you and the other humans aren't buckling with migraines." Ciri wasn't sure what protected her exactly. The Elder Blood, early exposure to magic, the fact that she was a Source... who could say. Except maybe Yen, and the last time she'd brought it up she'd gotten a mind-numbing lecture for her trouble. Better to simply let some things remain a mystery. 

Dandelion shrugged. "We will. Eventually. In an hour or two, but by that point one should be three sheets to the wind, so who can really tell the difference?" With a grin he waved down a passing barmaid who unceremoniously dropped two mugs on their table. Apparently one didn't order here. Or if you did, best be quick about it. The barmaid paused only long enough to peer closely at Dandelion's face. By the stretching of his grin he no doubt thought her a suitable distraction. Ciri suspected she was just interested in the growing bruise. 

She ignored them both to try the drink. Bitter and frothy, but it went down easier than most of what she'd had in the last year. Ciri took a long swing and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. 

"Which means," Dandelion continued, waving the barmaid away, "that we have more than enough time for you to tell me everything you've been up to. Don't spare the details! Though you may not have my knack for storytelling, dear, I know you're not entirely without talent. If you leave even a morsel out I'll be devastated." 

"Well, far be it from me to devastate you." 

"Precisely." 

So Ciri told Dandelion all, keeping her voice low in case a room full of creatures didn't take kindly to a list of her contracts. A few had eyed her swords upon entry, but said nothing, seemingly content to keep out of her way provided Ciri kept out of theirs. It was only too bad she couldn't say the same of her travels. Drowner infestations were one thing, even if the sailors too often tried to get handsy instead of paying her in coin, but a pack of werewolves had given her trouble for a solid month. All born into the curse, they possessed the ability to transform at will and had used it to their advantage as bandits, terrorizing a collection of villages. Solving the problem without indiscriminate slaughter had been a tricky business, demanding that Ciri pull from her knowledge of negotiation and mediation: neither of which were her strong suits. 

The werewolves at least would live out their days as members of a community. The rampaging godling out in Kaedwen was another matter entirely. Ciri hadn't had the privilege of meeting one until then — and she'd always assumed it was a privilege based on Geralt's teachings. "Not a beast to be put down," he'd say, eyeing the aggressive drunk. "Just mischievous. Respect them and at the very least you'll finish your contract without bloodshed. At best you'll come out of it with a friend." Well, she'd been more than respectful. Especially towards a being whose mischievous nature had resulted in families terrified of their own dreams, to the point where one newly minted wife had walked out her window. Another strangled her infant, thinking it an intruder. Ciri had tried to establish if the families had moved into what the godling perceived as her territory, if she had some sort of grievance towards young wives and mothers, even if it were possible for their species to fall under spells... all of it came to naught. Her inquiries were only met with laughter and, in time, more death. When a member of the Viper school had passed through and casually mentioned burdock root for navigating dreams, she'd bought him a drink, crushed a whole stem up in hers, and met the godling in another reality. Ciri couldn't swear she killed it, though as the Lady of Time and Space she suspected she'd had that edge. Either way, afterwards the women had slept soundly for a fortnight and it had felt safe to move on. 

There were others, of course, though no encounter quite as thrilling. It seemed like no matter how much people sneered at the trade — Geralt for his yellow eyes, her for being born a woman — everyone had a nest of something in need of extermination. Or a haunting to be put right. Or even, on occasion, just a particularly nasty job that no one else wanted to do. Ciri didn't mind mucking about in the sewers, provided her payment got her a bath at the end of the day. As well as, weeks later, the humor in watching Dandelion's face twist in on itself. 

"You didn't," he murmured, taking a large gulp of his drink. He swirled it as if to wash away an imaginary taste. "You drank from it?" 

"It was either that or die of thirst. I don't have a witcher's mutations. Sometimes you've just got to make do." 

"You poor, wretched thing." 

“Oh I know. Buy a poor, wretched thing another drink?” 

Speaking with Dandelion was easy. Even when he interrupted to supply what he considered to be the superior description, or went off on his own, thrilling tangents — forever stealing the spotlight. They were just the quirks of talking to him and after so long on the Path Ciri found herself welcoming the familiar. More than that, or the warm interior, or even the satisfying drink, she soaked up the feeling of family that permeated the air. 

It was a funny thing that, family. Funny, at least, if you shared her sense of humor. If anyone asked about her parentage (and plenty certainly had) they were in for quite the explanation. Born to the lovely Pavetta and Duny, though orphaned at a terribly young age. So really, in spirit Ciri’s parents were her grandparents, nothing less than the Lioness of Cintra herself and her devoted husband, Eist Tuirseach. But oh, haven't you heard? Her father hadn't really died. Why, he was no mere Lord, but the Emperor of Nilfgaard himself! Emhyr var Emreis, The White Flame Dancing on the Barrows of his Enemies and so on and so forth. Surely then he would be the one she referred to as 'Father'? Well, not when one considered a slew of complexities there, including her status as a Child Surprise. Duny, Eist, and Emhyr may have all vowed for the title of 'Father,' but destiny gave that dubious privilege to Geralt of Rivia and time proved one a wise man and the other a fool. So it was that Ciri found herself with three fathers, technically, though four if one considered the childhood emotions she'd attached to the Urcheon of Erlenwald. Two mothers as well, with the third arriving along with Geralt: Yennefer of Vengerberg. Sorceress. Visionary. Protector in the extreme. 

Yet the irony was that it didn't stop there. Who were the other witchers if not additional fathers, given joke names like 'Uncle' and 'Brother' to avoid confusion? What else made up the Lodge but mothers when it was they who taught her everything from magic to the ungodly chore of managing her blood each month? For an orphan Ciri had an uncommon number of parental figures... including the man who sat across from her. 

"Who's raising who?" she'd once heard Dijkstra mutter while Geralt and Dandelion had argued over her. It had been about something inconsequential, the disagreement lost to time, but Ciri, hardly a teen, recalled thinking that they were indeed like children in their bickering. 

Now, as an adult, she was inclined to re-term such moments as... frisky. In the absurdly strange way of all witchers and bards. But really, what friends argued so strongly over the raising of a daughter? 

Their interactions across nearly fifteen years hadn't exactly escaped her notice, even if childhood had often mischaracterized what precisely those interactions were. Nor, of course, could Ciri have missed how Dandelion kept speaking of romance without naming any new paramours. 

"So," she said, leaning across the table. This time a young man passed with drinks and Ciri snatched one, enjoying the spicy scent. She dangled the brew before Dandelion's nose before taking a sloppy sip. She was no lightweight, but they didn't skimp on the alcohol here either. 

Dandelion leaned forward to meet her. "So?" 

"Don't tell me I've been blathering on and you haven't thought of a single thing to share? No exciting adventures of your own? No... new friends?" 

In the shadows of the establishment Dandelion's face fell, then grew soft. In an instant the performer was gone and in his place sat a man closer to fifty than forty, a little tired, a little stressed, but more happy than anything else. He took the mug out of her hands and stole a drink for himself. "Can I share a secret with you, dear?" 

"Always." 

"Promise not to tell?" 

"Witcher's honor." 

"Your skillfully thrown punch may not have been the death of my career. I fear that's coming along just fine on its own." 

"Come on." 

He chuckled, so light and airy it floated away into the conversation around them. Ciri only knew he was laughing because of that smile and the shake in his shoulders. 

"All right, all right. You've caught me. There are still many men and women alike who flock to my side post-performance. Even a few who have asked for a private staging, if you catch my drift." 

"Dandelion. I've 'caught your drift' since I was fourteen and you gave me a lecture on avoiding venereal disease." 

"Did I?" 

"You were drunk." 

He took another massive gulp from their shared mug. "Well, that would explain it. But yes, I'm still popular — thank the gods for that — but I'd be a fool not to acknowledge that most of that stems from my unparalleled musical talent and a hefty nest egg. I'm not as limber as I once was, dear. I have wrinkles." Dandelion shook like a dog shedding water. 

Ciri smiled. Slow. Syrupy. "You're still the most handsome poet I know." 

"Oh thank you. I should hope so! The others are all cads..." 

"And you're dodging the question. Or the implied question, since I know you like to get technical." Dandelion scoffed. "No new friends? No last hurrahs before your golden years? Come off it, Dandelion. The last two times we've met up you haven't mentioned a single new 'acquaintance' and we both know you'd be talking up any encounters whether they'd been good or not. A girl's got to wonder." 

"A girl's gotten nosy." He slammed the now empty mug back on the table. "Let's go." 

"Ah — look. Sorry. If you don't want to talk about it — " 

"I don't want to talk about it here." Dandelion rolled his eyes with such fervor that Ciri worried for a moment that they'd leave his head. "Come now. Have I ever kept things from you? I'll tell all with a master's flair, but I'm doing it out of their earshot. Besides, that headache’s starting up." 

A few patrons cast them looks, which Ciri could only interpret as confirmation that they'd been eavesdropping. Then again, she'd been doing the same. There was a certain amount of camaraderie as they left the establishment, Dandelion passing a hand over all he knew (and dropping reminders not to mention him to Julia) and even she got a few nods of recognition. Changling, bard, vampire, or un-mutated Witcher, it seemed so long as you kept yourself to yourself all were welcome. 

She'd have to come back sometime. 

Ciri took note of the street as they ambled away, Dandelion's arm comfortably tucked into hers. They'd nearly reached the market before he spoke. 

"I know I just promised a tale, but are you really going to make me explain this?" His petulance drew out a laugh. 

"No," she admitted. "What's to explain? I’m not blind. You've spent the last twenty years following Geralt around and very nearly losing your head for the trouble. Or your voice. Your arm. Your balls, if some of those stories are to be believed."

"Oh, believe it, my dear."

"So I think that speaks for itself. Mere friends don't go to such lengths."

The toe of Dandelion's boot found a small stone, sending it soaring ahead of them. "Yet you forget one crucial detail."

"Enlighten me."

"Future loves do not have poetry worthy relationships with a sorceress."

She ground them both to a halt, the sudden loss of momentum drawing a curse from Dandelion. "Are you kidding me?" He squawked as Ciri reached up to knock some sense into him. Try to, anyway. "Oh, I knew immersing yourself in that exaggerated, destiny-laden, overly dramatic drivel would cause problems someday."

"One moment now! Drivel?"

Ciri ignored the outcry. "Yes, Geralt loves Yen... Just like Yen loves Istredd. Triss loves Geralt. Triss and Yen both had that weird thing for Philippa and don't even get me started on Fringilla. What do you think it means that Geralt spent months with Regis and Yen still dragged him up to that unicorn the moment he returned? Or that they casually talk about a 'sorceress' work' over the breakfast table? Dandelion, he's past his first century with so little family left. If you think that leaves less room for you in this mess than you're not nearly as smart as the masses claim. You’ve been listening to your own ballads too much."

She supposed this was some kind of accomplishment: leaving the most verbose man in The Continent utterly speechless. The alcohol still burned in the back of her throat and Ciri could admit that, in a more sober, everyday moment, she probably wouldn't have said as much as she had. But it was all true and dammit, if she'd learned anything since the Frost it was that a short life could be just as cursed as a long one. She was sick of people — herself included — letting things pass by.

"I don't know which is harder to believe," Dandelion murmured, raising a hand to his brow. "That you have twice assaulted me on this beautiful day. That I am being egged into a relationship with a witcher by his uncouth daughter..."

"Or?"

"Or that he remains that stunningly handsome at over a hundred years old."

Ciri snorted, tugging him along. Dandelion stumbled a moment, a testament to her words, but did quickly regain his feet. "You know we've never shied from discussions of sex in this family. Love though? Absolutely... so go slowly there."

A blush stained the great poet's cheeks, though no one else would have caught it on such a hot, sunny day. He delicately cleared his throat. "Any suggestions?"

"Hmm." Ciri pretended to think, tapping her chin. "We've been apart so long and really, our day has only just started, so I suggest that you come home with me. The three of us can start by having lunch."

The blush turned into a conspiratorial smile. "Where you will unexpectedly disappear, leaving the two of us alone?"

"But of course."

"My dear Ciri, I'll make a storyteller out of you yet."

A story she was more than happy to work on. How'd it go? Geralt would ask, trying to hide both face and curiosity. She'd done enough telling for today and Ciri looked forward to dragging Dandelion into their home, shoving him forward, and letting two of her dads work that out for themselves.

[carumens]

the violent delights excerpt

some of you have been asking how i’m tackling the topic of translation in my wip “the violent delights”, so here is a small scene so you guys can see the approach i’m trying. hope you enjoy!! give me yor thoughts!

Mr. Dawson picked up a chalk and wrote in the blackboard:

― Why did you leave your father’s house?

― To seek misfortune.

He looked for a place to leave the chalk, and when, apparently, he found none of his satisfaction, he let it fall to the floor. It broke in two symmetrical piece, one of which rolled for a few centimeters before coming to a reticent stop.

   “Translate this,” he said.

I looked at my classmates, but they were all already working on a piece of paper I hadn’t even seen them taking out. I took out my notebook and wrote my translation.

“Well?” he asked, clapping his hands to dust them off. “Who wants to start? Yes, your name?”

“Lukas.”

“Lukas what else?”

 “Gebhardt.”

 “Gebhardt, please, proceed.”

“¿Por qué dejaste la casa de tu padre? Para buscar la desgracia.”

“Okay, well done,” he said. “Next, Highsmith, I’m glad to see you’ve decided to keep on gracing us with your presence.”

She smiled, or maybe she grimaced, I’m still not sure. “¿Por qué abandonaste la casa de tu padre?” she read. “Para perseguir la desgracia.”

“That’s good, as always. Same meaning, a bit more poetic, maybe.”

Lola raised her hand and Dewson signaled for her to speak. “¿Por qué te fuiste de la casa de tu padre?” she said. “Para buscar la desgracia.”

I noticed her accent was different to when she had talked in Spanish to me previously, more precise, more clipped, all trace of the aspiration of the s and the alluring singsong to her vowels gone.

“Very good, very good. Now, your partner?”

I nodded and read my translation. “¿Por qué te fuiste de casa de tu padre? Para buscar la desgracia.”

“Good, once again, well,” he said, turning to André. “The gentleman here is the only one left, please, go ahead.”

André cleared his voice, and with that simple action, I knew there was something he had realized, or maybe he had already know, that we didn’t. “¿Por qué ha dejado la casa de su padre? Para buscar la desgracia.”

Dewson hummed, a please smile curling in his lips. “Your name?”

“André.”

“André,” he said, walking closer to him. “Why have you chosen, unlike the rest of your peers, to use the formal addressing form of ‘usted’ instead of ‘tú’?

“I’ve read the book.”

“Ah! Good answer!” He turned to look at all of us. “There will never be two translations that are the same, just like there will never be two books that are the same. Even if we are given the same idea, the same characters, the same plot points and even the same writing style, two different people will always, always, write different books. It’s the same with translations: there are as many translations as there are translators, and all of them might be correct and valid. Taking this into consideration, can the perfect translation exist?”

He let the idea hang in the air, his face expectant and bright as he looked at each of our faces. I was debating with myself whether it was a rhetoric question or not. When none of us answered he clapped his hands twice, as if to wake us up.

“No,” said Lola.

“Now, all of your translations were perfect semantically, syntactically and grammatically speaking,” he said, bowing his head slightly at Lola. “But pragmatically? André’s was the best. Why?”

“Because I had a context.”

“Exactly. In our example, the main difficulty was the complete inexistence of a formal pronoun in English, a pronoun we do find in Spanish and many other langauges. How do we know when to use the formal pronoun if there isn’t one in English? One word: context.” He turned around, wrote the word on the blackboard and circled it three times. “It is very difficult to translate without a context, specially so in literary translation, where one word is not only its denotative meaning. That is why, before translating a book, you have to get to know it as good as if you had written it yourself.

 “If you translate, to follow with our example, ‘Ulysses’, you must be sure that what you translate is what James Joyce himself would have translated. Know the book, not the origin language, know the target language, and know what you want to say and how you want to say it. As long as you have you have your solid, justifiable reasons, your translation might be more than valid.”

“But how can there be more than one perfect translations?” asked Lukas, his face creased in a perfect frown.

“I never said there could be more than one perfect translation,” countered Dewson. “I said there could be more than one valid translation, because, in fact, as our friend ―what was it, sorry?”

“Heredia Cortés.”

“As our friend Heredia pointed out, the perfect translation does not exist,” he said. “Not because translator are faulty in any way, but because languages are, simply, untranslatable.”

“What?” I said.

Dewson laughed and pointed at Kendra. “Highsmith, we talked about this on your first year here at St. Jerome. Care to explain to your mates?”

Kendra straightened up and said, “Languages are not mathematical equations in which five plus five equals ten. There are twists and turns and whole sets of mentalities behind words and expressions. Precisely because languages are not mathematics, there cannot be a perfect translation, because they would cease to be what they are in essence.”

“And what are they?”

“A tool to communicate, to express, to feel. And as a tool, it’s ductile, it changes with time and space and circumstances and even mental conditions of the speakers.”

“But, then, why are we even here?” asked Lukas.

“I don’t know,” answered Dewson. “Why are you?”

 Lukas huffed and burrowed himself deeper in his beige mackintosh.

“Let me illustrate this to you,” said Dewson. “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

A pause, two snorts, three frowns.

“How do we say it Spanish,” urged Dewson.

“Está lloviendo a cántaros,” said Kendra.

“That is certainly the correct translation. But is it perfect?”

“Yes,” said Lukas.

“No,” said Dewson. “That is the correct translation of the sense of it, but what about the words? This translation is valid as an everyday expression, used by the people in the streets or in a newspaper. But what about if we find it in a literary text?”

“I don’t know,” said Lukas. “I’d have to see.”

“You’re right, you’re right. Take, for example, these lines:

               “Está lloviendo a cántaros

               llenos de mi propia sangre

               me ahogo dentro de mis venas

               dentro de mí mismo muero.”

No one had an answer, so none was given.

“As translators, you will have to solve this and many more questions. Form or contents? Image or meaning?” said Dewson. “Don’t fret just because you don’t know how to yet, that is why you are here: to learn. For the moment, I want you to think for a solution for the aforementioned problem in the poem I recited.”

[yr-bed]

Referencesreferencesreferences

Lauren Oyler is my favourite living critic, and I’m excited to read her debut novel Fake Accounts. I’ve been reading a lot of the press around it, including this interview with The Atlantic where she answers the question “ To what extent do conspiracy theories and fiction relate to each other?” thusly

To great extent! You could say conspiracy theories are like bad fiction, which attempts to tie everything up and explain it all. Neither leave room for randomness or pointlessness or meaninglessness. But life is full of all these, and our desire to eliminate them leads us down narrower and narrower paths.

There’s also a tendency to read symbols and metaphors in life the way we read them in fiction, which creates all sorts of problems. When you read symbols and metaphors in fiction, you know where they came from: the author. If you find a symbol or metaphor in life, you might start freaking out about where it came from and what it really means. The specifics of the stories conspiracists tell tend to camouflage the more interesting elements about them, which to me are all about (1) motivation—why am [I] being told this?—and (2) their unstable relationship to the real: Some aspect of this could actually be true, or come from something real. Both are essential elements of fiction as well.

Which, first of all, is a characteristically incisive read on the proliferation of conspiracy theories within modern western political discourse. It also resurfaced in my mind today, a couple of weeks after I first read it, whilst scrolling through the Genius entries for songs from Black Country, New Road’s hot-off-the-press debut album, For the first time.

I really really like For the first time. Opening your debut album with an instrumental called “Instrumental” and ending with a song called “Opus” are a sandwich of baller moves. “Track X” is what a love song written by Steve Reich might sound like. I’m not the only one to notice that considerable changes had been made to the lyrics and arrangements of pre-album singles “Athen’s, France” and “Sunglasses,” the latter of which was one of my most-listened songs in 2019 and 2020, if Spotify’s records are to be believed. Not being smart enough to figure out the changes for myself, and heeding Jarvis’s First Law, I went over to the often-ironically-named Genius with the expectation that the site’s membership may well have crowd-sourced annotations which would do the heavy analytical lifting for me. 

[Adam Curtis voice] And then, something strange happened. Well, maybe not strange, but sort of interesting. The problem with Genius has been well documented by more intelligent documenters than I, as are the potential pitfalls of crowdsourcing knowledge in general. In this particular instance, the phenomena I happened upon wasn’t the proliferation of white boys clumsily trying to pick apart the internal rhymes and culturally-specific reference points of trap songs, but a form of context collapse typical of a lot of so-called cultural critiques you get on the Internet of 2021.

Talking to everyone and talking to no-one has lead to a curious reading of Black Country, New Road’s lyrics (part of a verbose, hyper-referential scene that primarily exists in my head, alongside Squid). Rather than drawing on the specific socioeconomic and cultural context the band exist in, and which they often directly call out in their music, there’s a grasping to read symbols and metaphors in an almost wilfully literal and dull fashion. And imho it sucks!

Above is a representative example from the Genius page for the single version of “Sunglasses.” It’s a song which wields the cultural signifiers of comfortable middle class existence in modern Britain with equal parts disgust and familiarity. Amongst The Guardian-friendly reference points are Nutribullets, single malt whiskey, complaining about mediocre theatre and, in the killer of an opening line, multi-part Danish crime dramas of the sort that air on BBC Four. All of these work in concert to produce, in the words of frontman Isaac Wood, a portrait of a family of “wealth or affluence.” Crucially, however, not one “written from a critical or even external position,” which is one of the more interesting aspects of the song (and the band in general), occupying as they do a self-reflexively privileged position not dissimilar to the Metropolitan Liberal Elite’s satirical voice of choice, Stewart Lee. It makes things slipperier, harder to gain purchase on. The mix of the specific and abstract in the song is intentional: you’re never going to uncover a “true meaning,” but you can at least get a sense of what they’re trying to communicate.

What the ironically-named Genius annotators choose to focus on, however, is not this fairly obvious deployment of cultural symbols amidst an otherwise allusive and elusive set of lyrics, but unpicking precisely which six-part Danish crime drama is being referenced. I will charitably admit that yes, perhaps there is a specific show Wood is referencing in his lyrics here, but: who gives a shit? That’s besides the point! “Knowing” that he’s singing about something called The Jack of Hearts doesn’t add anything to the song (it also belies a further cultural ignorance in that the phrase is clearly used here, paired with The Fonz, as a somewhat-ironic iconic “Cool Guy”). Susie Sonts would be spinning in her grave if she got anywhere near this shit.

In “Against Interpretation”, one of the foundational texts which informed my way of thinking about art and criticism and I would argue is crucial in navigating the anaemic and non-confrontational symbol-chasers of today, Susan Sontag rails against the “contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation [...] often prompted by an open aggressiveness [...] The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys.” 

This is the dominant interpretative style of now. From politics to indie rock, there is a harried, prescriptive and literal approach to making sense of things, of settling on rote and superficial readings. A symbol has a literal meaning; A means A; references are not poetic allusions, but puzzle boxes to be cracked open and, once they have, mastered and then returned, inert and unusable, to the shelf. There are fewer attempts to approach texts in good faith, or to acknowledge the broader context in which people act and create, a bastardised deployment of Barthes which makes the word significantly less interesting, as opposed to the other way around. Do you think the couplet “Trips to B&Q with your other half / This is how the other half lives” in Squid’s “Houseplants” is part of a similarly vicious-yet-complicit takedown of middle class life, or calling out Jacob Riis’s 1890 work of photojournalism “documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums”?

There is a disengagement with context and, in its place, an analytical approach which -- in this instance -- appears to me to also shirk engagement with the “randomness or pointlessness or meaninglessness” of some of the cascading cavalcade of references, veiled and otherwise, culturally and personally specific, which is one of the most entertaining aspects of Black Country, New Road’s music. Instead it’s about finding a definitive meaning, often through the filter of other reference points which are not actually appropriate or relevant, as a sort of attempt to assert dominance over a text. As the conspiracy theorist incorrectly applies close reading to chaotic reality in order to create a kind of order, so the Genius annotator manages to lack the ability to apply close reading to a chaotic text. To further co-opt Oyler’s words, the paths ought to be sprawling off in all directions, rather than narrow and meticulously signposted.

Anyway. Back soon to actually talk about the changes made between the single and album versions of “Sunglasses” and “Athen’s, France,” with reference to Evangelion and Car Seat Headrest’s Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror)/ (Face to Face)!

[myanalyticalcrutch-blog]

Pagan Poetry

Written for FS 464: Film as a Visual Poem, on September 18, 2017

Bjork is, like many poetic artists, misunderstood by a lot of people. However, there is a reason she has won awards and gotten media attention, other than her swan dress. She pours herself out into every song, and whether you understand what she is saying or not, you can feel the raw emotion behind it. Both the song and video for Pagan Poetry explore the dialog between love, pain, and lust. Bjork is telling us about her love for someone and the pleasure he gives her along with the pain attached to him. This pain is both wanted and unwanted, almost necessary for the relationship. The abstract images slowly become more clear, revealing different parts of Bjork herself. She is showing herself and becoming more comfortable, realizing what she wants before our eyes, being reborn in a sense. Love is considered sacred in most cultures. It is supposed to be the closest thing to a magical experience that you can have. The worst people can change for love, the true happiness makes them want to be better or opens their eyes to a new point of view. Love can also blind you from the bad things about your partner or the world itself. The shelter of love can both be constructive and destructive.

We witness the piercing of her nipples on screen. Body mutilation is shown as a way of expression and self-love as it is for many people. Many cultures even use it as a sign of honor or bravery. Whereas in many western cultures, tattoos, piercings, and scarification are seen as the sign of someone who hates themselves and others. It is seen as unprofessional and unfriendly, though it is slowly becoming more accepted. But it is also to resemble to piercing pain that love can be related to. The draping of pearls and lacing of the piercings on her back match the weaving of the messages and emotions of love and agony throughout the song. Her vocals are precise but have an animalistic quality, adding to the true emotion of the piece. The love and pain for her is instinctual human nature, but it has such a taboo around it, she must question if it is what is best for her. When her face is fully shown, she is smiling while singing, as though she is in ecstasy. However, as the song goes into a chant of “I love him” she stops singing on screen and seems to be in distress. This chant gives the song and video a sense of ritual, love and pain dialog ritually. One must always sacrifice something for love.

Many marriages end in divorce. I have always wanted to believe that love existed in the beginning or at least somewhere down the line. People are breaking the taboo that you must love one person forever. Love cannot exist without pain. She is wearing a dress by Alexander McQueen, a famous fashion designer, another artist. The dress exposes most of her torso with a mermaid bottom creating an incomplete wedding dress aesthetic. There are pearls, often seen as a feminine accessory, draped from her neck and shoulders. She is breaking taboos and bringing up stereotypes addressed to being a proper woman while she herself is embracing pain with love. She is opening exposing herself and the love and pain coupled with ecstasy and lust. The lyrics also suggest that perhaps there was an openness to the relationship at some point, or perhaps in her last relationship. This brings up the possibility that it started as something solely sexual and for her it developed into other feelings. It is often said that one of the most painful things in life is losing a lover or partner. She yells and shouts with a smile on her face that he makes her want to hurt herself. Shortly after we see an image of corset piercings on her back and blood around the holes. The weaving of these emotions is making her bleed and yet she will not let go of them because they also provide her with a sense of liberation from the bonds of social norms in relationships and as a woman.

People are highly affected by the emotions tied to poetry and music. Our lives are surrounded constantly by music and its effects. Some people argue that particular music can affect us negatively, while others claim that all music has a sense of liberation for individuals. According to legends, Orpheus was the first poet. He is usually depicted holding a musical instrument known as a lyre. In many images, the lyre is being held to his chest and close to his heart. It captures the soul of the poet, his love, his emotions, and all that he is. Music and poetry are to this day seen as way to ultimately expose yourself emotionally and express everything that you are and hope to be. Two important words that have risen from the lyre are lyrics and lyrical. These words are used to describe art from all genres, including music, painting, poetry, and film. All essential to an artist’s everyday life. Lyrics are words, often associated with poetry that are connected to a melody and are meant to be sung, not just spoken, however, there is a thin line that is often crossed between speaking and singing. Poetry itself is very musical. It is aware of rhythm, tones, and patterns. Chants and repetition can be seen in both music as well as poetry. The chorus of many modern songs is extremely repetitive and can evoke the feeling of a chant, especially when we look at genres like rap and hip hop. Rap is a genre that frequently crosses the line between singing and rapping and focuses highly on rhythm and rhyme just as poetry does, whereas other genres may focus more on the melody and the music.

As stated before, there is a thin line between music and poetry and they are often weaved together. They both deliver and story in a very strong, emotional, and intimate way. The artist is aware of all of the elements that go into his piece and strives to capture the essence of being human. This also applies to film, a visual poem. However, it is not a visual poem the same way that a painting is, it has literal movement and stillness contrasting each other. Film is a massive mixing pot of many different art forms. Greek tradition calls the poet and lyrical being, lyricism being strongly attached to passion. Plato had said that poets are enthusiasts. They are expressive, passionate and energized by that passion. To Plato, enthusiasm is a trance. Poets become enraptured by their subjects, they dig deeper and deeper into something and they cannot be pulled out of their art and passions. In The Republic, he says that poets should not be included in the city. They are radicals or have a tendency to embrace radical behavior and thoughts, and this is a danger to society. Poets abandon logic and twist language, they play with concepts like young children poking at dead animal carcasses. They explore depths of opinions and subjects that are taboo and to most people should not be thought about. Tarkovski’s poets illustrate two sides of this. His mad poet is loud and filled with rage. He is disruptive and subjects everyone in his presence to his truth, he scars them with the images of his death and the sounds of his final cried. The wise poet, however, uses silence to contemplate his message. It slowly sinks deep and has a chilling tone about it. He is caught in a silent trance while performing his final ritual.

In a sense, poets create their own language. Shakespeare is one example of a poet literally creating language. He betrayed the known laws of language and created terms and phrases that are still common in language long after his death. His impact on society and art is immeasurable. His plays have been rewritten and stories retold over and over. His plays often put people in the shoes of the poet, entrancing them and inviting them to think about the taboo and unusual. Topics of spirituality and sexuality are often covered in Shakespearean plays and poetry. Lyricism and poetry can represent the elevation of the voice and the gaze from the creation of language. As long as that language is lived through momentum and constantly fed with the energy of the poet and the audience.

Poetry embraces the duality of chaos and order. Many poems have a strict formatting while also exploring the chaos of humankind within its text. Poets whether through literature or image are obsessed with paradoxes and irony. There is a constant idea of the overlap between two things usually seen as opposites. Black and white are colors used frequently as a metaphor even when the concepts presented in the piece explore the many different shades of grey. Modern art often depicts Orpheus as a meaningful hero. He is seen as a representation of the human experience and what it means to be an individual. He is to thank for the many different forms of art and poetry that our lives come into contact with. We have access to so many different ways of expressing ourselves and sending a message to other people. We can connect and embrace other people and individual personalities through poetry while exploring areas of our subconscious we are not always familiar with. Raoul Dufy shows Orpheus surrounded by the sea and nature. In the image, there is a balance between the sky and the ocean. The presence of nature is a representation of how natural poetry is and poet’s deep connection with nature and life. Orpheus is at the center of the world and able to communicate across many platforms and elements. He can dialog with life and the spirit of nature. This lines up with the legend that his power of words and lyricism, he was able to communicate with the entire world, from the biggest creatures, to the smallest, down to small specks of life hardly seen or noticed by humankind. It is said that he could even make stones cry. This legend applies the idea of super natural power to poets.

As creators, artists across all genres adapt a special style so they can be seen as an individual and separate themselves from the works of other famous creators. They often have another artist that helped them discover their art, style, and passion. Visual poets are true visionaries, their gaze being projected with and onto others and sending out sparks of inspiration to other aspiring artists that wish to show the world their point of view. Orpheus’ vision and gaze was so powerful, that he could be seen as an extremely unsettling force. He could dialog with the Gods. I can understand why Plato would want to kick out poets if they could speak to the Gods. Poetry and visual poems explore spirituality and occasionally the spirit world itself. It is often referenced or its image depicted within poetry or films. Poets have a particular charm to them, making them dangerous because this charm gives them the power to speak with many different forms of life and even gives them a sort of power over others. Other people can be put into a trance with the chant of a poet. They can become mesmerized and led away from the dangerous safety of societal norms.

Art is a journey. Film, music, and poetry all take us on an adventure when they attempt to capture the Orphic voice. Their rhythm and voice often embracing a sense of ritual. Similar to how many parts of Bjork’s video do. The act of piercing is a ritual of adulthood and life events in many cultures. Even within modern western culture there is an accepted way to perform the act of piercing one’s body. In Pagan Poetry, she undergoes a journey of self-discovery through love and pain, just as is the poets goal to go on an extreme journey. However, extreme can mean even the smallest things. Because poets look at the world through the grey and in between areas, they do not always see the black and white as the most extreme. So many people accept that life if black and white that it is more extreme to walk somewhere in the middle. Though poets and filmmakers often explore the unknown and unreal, they also have to acknowledge reality. You cannot explore the unknown without first knowing what is known and accepted amongst the masses. Music videos bring poetry, music, and filmmaking together as a holy and transgressive experience. Artists like Bjork explore parts of reality and the subconscious seen as taboo through these art forms. She, as well as the filmmaker, want the viewer to also explore everything from the visuals, to the music, to the lyricism and words. Pagan Poetry explores the Orphic voice with its playful journey through sexuality, risk, love, and pain as one.

[abjectionproductions-blog]

An Interview with Interregnum

Could you introduce the group? Who you are and what you do in Interregnum?

Gregory: The idea for the project has been evolving for around two years. Joshua and I met through Tumblr, when he submitted a collection of short stories to Cutlines Press (I was acting as co-editor). It turned out that we shared so many interests, from music and literature to occultism, that we began working on a publication that came out last December, a literary collection called Collapsed Cartographies. [http://www.cutlinespress.com/category/e-book/]  Other authors and artists contributed, and Joshua and I recorded an album to go along with the literary material. [https://collapsedcartographies.bandcamp.com/album/collapsed-cartogrophies]. In the group I do vocals, synth, harmonium, stick dulcimer, bells, rattles, field recordings and samples, etc…

Joshua: Hello, there. My name is Josh. I play things in Interregnum, I suppose. I sample stuff as well. Gregory and I kind of play everything. I don’t think we have set roles in the project. He plays the harmonium. I can’t play that. Or, at least I don’t own one. It’s my favorite part of our sound, though.

What's the origin of the project? Why the name Interregnum?

Gregory: As I said, we began with a pretty ambitious literary collaboration, and that has grown into Interregnum as a specific musical outlet.  The word “interregnum” means an interval or pause, and especially a period between reigns, of governmental transition. I first encountered the word around a year ago, and have found it increasingly useful in terms of political analysis. I think that, globally, we are definitely in a disorienting situation, where the coordinates of the 20th century (the Cold War, for example), are no longer adequate. I came of age during the era of the Bush administration in the U.S, which was a time when it looked like the U.S. was going to be able to set the agenda for the world, on the heels of the 90s boom, and so on. Now—after the global financial crisis, the failure of U.S. imperial policy (reminiscent of the decline of Soviet power, e.g., in their inability to control Afghanistan) all the ideas even of the Bush era seem totally inadequate. So many big projects and visions have failed, whether we are talking about U.S. imperial “democracy,” 20th century socialism, or even the new age movement – the whole millennial atmosphere of the turn of the century is dispersing. We’ve had record temperatures worldwide every month for almost a year. I mean, I saw spring flowers blooming in the middle of winter here in Louisiana in 2015. I am interested in exploring these zones of in-betweenness musically.

Joshua: Gregory and I actually met through the kind of transgressive literature scene. He published a few short stories of mine. We still connect on that level I think. I’m working as a kind of third creative mind on his novel The Ugly Spirit, which is fucking great, by the way. I’m the E.K. to his Edmund Spenser. We started making music together to soundtrack the publication and we just clicked. We both have hands in the same kind of experimental sound.

Why the choice of Scandinavian mythology as a concept for the Wolf Age album?

Gregory: I don’t have an exact answer of why we decided to focus here. I have worked with Odin and the runes in the past. The mythology is something that comes up periodically in my life. After working on Collapsed Cartographies, Joshua and I were talking about a possible EP centered around Norse mythology. I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the apocalyptic current in northern mythology (i.e. with the idea of Ragnarok), and that seems like a fitting motif for the times, given that we are in some kind of interregnum. 

Joshua: Gregory contacted me regarding putting together a project based on Norse Mythology. We both have a complicated relationship with the occult. I think our concept for the album, the lack of gender binary in Norse folklore, has a good academic basis and also might stop neo-fascist, dude-bro Asatru types from listening to our music, which is good.

During the creative process of the album there was some sort of material (musical, literary, artistic, etc.) or personal experience that influenced your way of work?

Gregory: At a highly abstract level, the mood suggested by this corresponded with a number of things happening in my life at the time. My grandmother was dying and I was also coming out of a period of pharmaceutical drug addiction, so I was in a dark and foreboding mood, but also being forced to start over on various levels. Joshua began sending me skeletal tracks with titles referring to specific episodes in the Poetic Edda. From there I added vocals or whatever else I felt inspired to add. In retrospect, I think that I benefitted by being prompted to create around mythic themes, which drew me away from the purely close-up view of my own life. In everything I did, I tried to maintain a certain fidelity to the stories in the Edda.

Joshua: This was recorded during a period of immense, but painful personal growth for me. Lots of stuff changed while we were making this. As far as artistic influences, a lot of David Bowie. Old gay pornography. Death in June. Metro Boomin. The devil, perhaps.

Could you describe the process of recording?

Gregory: We did everything remotely. Joshua would send me a base track, or I would send him one. He would add something. I would add something. I think we both gravitated toward a combination of improvisational, noisy approaches, with a structured style of song writing. I definitely wanted to have choruses, verses, and all of that sort of thing, but also a tendency for that coherence to dissolve, and then come back together.

Joshua: We recorded our parts separately and then emailed them to each other. Postal Service style.  

Wolf Age possesses a strong ritualist vibe. Is there some sort of proceeding to fully appreciate the music as a listener?

Gregory: My approach to music reflects my life-long interest in the occult. I haven’t made any music specifically for rituals, but the music is, as you say, ritualistic. I do hope that listeners will have some interesting experience with the music. The tracks on this album refer to a mythic temporality, as does ritual. I would like for listeners to have a sense of being transported outside of our mundane sense of being in the world.

Joshua: Not for me. Take from it what you will.

The album is going to be released in cassette, could you comment briefly about that and why this media was chosen?

Gregory: We both have a strong interest in analog musical instruments. We use analog synth, drum machine, etc. I’m a good decade older than Joshua (30), so I have a certain nostalgic interest in these formats. The first album I ever bought was on tape, and my earliest sound experiments were with tape recorders. On a very pervasive level, this continuing interest is related to my long-term engagement with the work of William S. Burroughs, and the tape recorder-fueled influence that he had on a certain moment in time, particularly in the U.K. My primary touchstones, musically, are Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Current 93, and that whole occult musical scene…I see myself as continuing Burroughs’ research, as it were, to the point where I’ve literally done magical work to be in contact with Burroughs from beyond the grave. Also there seems to be a cassette revival going on now, like what has been happening with vinyl. I am interested in being part of that, precisely because it doesn’t seem to be purely backwards-looking. In fact, through the establishment of networks, particularly online, the cassette revival is intertwined with a lot of musical innovation. I like what Croatian Amor is doing, for example. There are so many new cassette releases at the moment.

Joshua: It’s just the classic underground music format. I love the scale of it. I love that it can be manipulated and destroyed and reshaped.

Do you see any relationships between the religious traditions of New Orleans and the ones practiced by the old Scandinavians?

Gregory: That’s an interesting question. In short, yes.

There has always been a lot going on in Louisiana. On the one hand, it is certainly a U.S. city, but it is also part of the Caribbean—in many respects the northern limit of the Caribbean. Many of the forces that have operated in Latin America have also been present here, so we have this kind of imported Mediterranean/pan-Latin/Catholic thing going on. For instance, I grew up outside of New Orleans in a rural, Sicilian ethnic community, embedded in a majority black town. It’s an odd experience of race and culture, considering, say, the historical composition of the Midwestern U.S. Another part of my family is from a Canary Island immigrant community, here. So I grew up around official Catholicism as well as folk Catholicism. The latter involved many essentially magical practices and orientations. Now, living in New Orleans, I see the ways that Hoodoo is still alive here, along with growing practices of Santeria, Mexican curanderismo, the Santa Muerte cult, etc. I’ve practiced Golden Dawn-style ceremonial magic for a long time as well. I feel very close to that, but there is something missing in that sort of practice, namely the veneration of ancestors and things like that, as I see in folk Catholic practices. I suspect that there are similarities between these kinds of approaches and how northern Europeans, in a shamanic culture, would have related to reality. I have more understanding of the contemporary traditions I just mentioned, whereas northern paganism is a reconstruction, except in the sense in which it survived and came down through fairy tales, folk songs, and so on. In that regard, we’re left speculating based on textual evidence and our own spiritual experimentation. Freya Aswynn has said that she sees similarities between northern paganism and West African diaspora religion. Something to think about.  

Joshua: I’m actually not from New Orleans. I’ve been there a few times, though. Last time I ended up drinking absinthe with Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys. Wild.

In your opinion, what type of role does paganism exert in our contemporary society?

Gregory: Modernity brought about a radical de-centering, so that the Christian God is no longer at the center of social life in western civilization, or whatever we want to call it. Global capitalism has created a situation where extreme mixing of cultures is an accomplished fact. I don’t see any potential in resisting that mixing; we have already lost the ground of former identities, such that they ever existed. In some respects, maybe this is like a hyper-driven version of what happened in late antiquity, where Egyptian and Greek religious practices blended together, and Hermeticism and strange Gnostic cults flourished amid wild experimentation…This was brought about by the existence of a cosmopolitan empire that foreshadowed capitalist globalization. Gods abounded. This was the death of an old world but also a time of great creation.

Joshua: Paganism IS our society. Everything humans will ever do that is not directly related to our baseline survival implies faith and implies symbolism and implies archetypal thinking.

Any message to your listeners?

Gregory: If you’re out there, I want to connect with you! I want to find others who have the same deep longings that are driving me create art and think about the world, even in the face of the major disasters that are unfolding around us.

Joshua: Don’t ask permission. 

Follow @interregnum-music, @abjectionproductions

Facebook/Bandcamp

[runandtellthatreviews]

Prelude Books, $15.95

https://preludebooks.com/jason-koo/

By Allison Bird Treacy

Just weeks before John Ashbery’s death last fall; I took the holy journey from New York City to Hudson, NY where the ninety-year-old poet made his home. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was stepping directly into the poetic lineage recounted in Brooklyn Poets founder Jason Koo’s third full-length collection More Than Mere Light (Prelude, 2018). A close examination of the New York School’s genealogy, Koo’s poetry has expanded the forms developed by Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and others during the 1950s and 1960s and expanded it to fit his own experiences as an Asian-American man, a half-century removed.

One remarkable feature of More Than Mere Light is how it is uniquely structured around a few long poems, particularly “No Longer See,” a fifty page epistolary-like piece, and to a reader the form could easily intimidate. Koo’s everyday language, like that of his stylistic predecessors, however, readily welcomes the reader into the poem. Absorption into the text overshadows both the length and the examination of the New York School or trendy books, opening the poem at multiple levels.

The first lines of Koo’s long poem, “No Longer See,” drop each other into the “I do this, I do that” style characteristic of O’Hara’s poems – and with the immediacy common to most of the New York School and the poem helps us navigate with intermittent time stamps. He begins,

Somehow it’s 2:43 PM and ready I’ve frittered away most of my day.         How are you? Banal question for a banal, as usual, Day. Every day for the past few weeks I’ve been thinking of starting        This letter

Though little is happening in these first lines from a narrative perspective, that is precisely Koo’s point; his style is built upon the banal, on observations of the city he lives in and of daily life. And what poet – what person – doesn’t know deeply the procrastination these lines describe? Koo strikes to the heart of our modern lives by highlighting that wasted time, and as he continues, observes how this poem is a manipulation of his time. He wants to write a letter but also “to write poems, /and writing this letter meant writing prose, which/Would get in the way of those…” Then again, why shouldn’t more of our communication be in poem?

The idea that we can communicate in poem is too rare in our work, despite dedications, yet if we look backward it has a long lineage. Shakespeare, Yeats, and, yes, O’Hara, among many others, call count poems of address as part of their oeuvres. And for Koo, as for his literary predecessors, our daily lives are deserving of such artful observation, while the prose line is worthy of poetry’s linguistic and spatial invention. He plays with this form in “No Longer See,” with its variation on the traditional prose poem, as he writes about reading Jack Gilbert:

In the dark of the apartment, a seductive cool without the annoyance       of mosquitoed toes. The muffled sweet moans Changed as she changed from what she was not into the more she was.      Amazing sentence. The original enjambs after sweet Then not. You have to read that sentence again to catch all the nifty nuances       I’ve put in there, as I’ve added my own enjambment To complicate things, things sweet then not, become a sweet knot.

Koo does not flinch at the pleasure of sound play, pushing it beyond common consonance or assonance and instead spilling homonyms and repetition into his reimagining of Gilbert into the prose of a letter. And, perhaps more amusingly, he puts a puzzle into the poem, and then points it out. Koo says, I dare you to go back and look at that again. Look at how much these common words can do when split and rearranged. The space of the poem, the stanza and the page, are an infinite playground.

To continue reading “No Longer See” is to dig deeper into the entanglement of the arts world – the cursory reading of trendy poets published by Wave Press (wonderful, but here read for the hipster street cred), the way Jackson Pollock’s work causes people to say ‘I could do that,’ a response also occasioned by work like this long poem-letter – but what about the rest of More Than Mere Light? The title, shared with the first poem and taken from Karl Ove Knausgaard, welcomes us into the book:

The day always came with more than mere light, came hugely pawing         through the windows, Frisking you up, no soft fortress of pillows cobbled around your head could         help you. The sunlight in silence pouring down, insidiously weighted With all the expectations of the city, the street cleaners moving through Unearthing groggy zombies parking in pajamas, The drilling beginning, men tucked inside the scaffolding on the brownstone         next door

Koo firmly roots his poems in New York City, particularly in Brooklyn, yet the idea that “The day always came with more than mere light” has broader implications. It comes with obligations and exhaustion, no matter how we push back against the, yet also with wonder if we pay attention. Notice, for example, how the annoyance of drilling also comes with the peculiar phrasing “men tucked inside the scaffolding,” so that the reader cannot help but imagine a miniature, urban dollhouse, the tiny figures posed on the ledges and in hidden crevices. This small change of perspective, here a plain verb made strange, transforms the ordinary.

Too often, we embed ourselves in one of two camps: constant boredom or persistent wonder, or in modern parlance, everything is either #fml or #blessed. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other, and we can find more pleasure and more play in that in between space, where there’s breathing room. After all –

Maybe stabbing is what the fire needs, not water, Maybe stabbing is what the self needs, not water, not mere light, holes to           create some breathing, As when a child traps some caterpillars in a jar and punctures holes over the          foil sealing its opening

And next morning fresh caterpillars have bloomed all over mom’s curtains.

When was the last time you looked between the buildings and room to grow, found more than just mere light filtering through? As he records quotidian New York scenes, Jason Koo pauses over those remarkable moments, lets them stand alongside the complaints and consumerism, the competition and social climbing. Here, surprises appear in all their strange glory, like caterpillars on the curtains, perhaps unwelcome and yet wondrous all at once

[jetlaggedinparis]

My French Life™ - Ma Vie Française® BOOK CLUB

IT'S TIME TO BUY BOOK #3

***' You Will Not Have My Hate' by Antoine Leiris ***

- This book was not my first choice. I changed my mind after interviewing Sam Taylor, the translator of both Leïla Slimani and Antoine Leiris, who confessed: 'The biggest emotional reaction I’ve had to a translation was with Antoine Leiris’s ‘You Will Not Have My Hate’, which made me cry several times.'

-It's the poignant testimony of the days that followed the 13 November 2015 Paris terrorist attack where the author lost his wife and mother of their 17-month old toddler. It's a 129-page novella you may read in the span of 2 hours.

- In addition, My French Life - Ma Vie Francaise also published a 2018 Summer reading list of recent English books set in France and I invite you to discuss them at the same time. (https://www.myfrenchlife.org/…/french-summer-reading-top-b…/)

- Book club meeting #3 is likely to take place 2nd half of September.

 Members’ first comments after announcement

ANNE: I have just purchased the ebook and I look forward to the Book club meeting in September.

DEANIE: I recently watched the documentary on Netflix so I'm looking forward to reading this.  

JACQUELINE: It will be interesting to discuss both the book and the documentary (and since it was made by the husband of a member of MyFrenchLife Community, I suppose we'll be able to ask her questions if we need to)  

CAROLYNE: I've started reading the French edition. The prose style is exquisite, the subject matter heartbreaking.  I think it is a type of oxymoron, although not so incongruous in this literary context as oxymorons usually are, since there are many works telling of the death of people close to the author yet written so beautifully, so we don't feel it is incongruous so much, although we still reel from the emotional weight of it. Joan Didion's book about the death of her husband and daughter does this too, although in a diffferent way to this author. There is also an Australian author who wrote about the loss of his family many years ago in his book 'Year One', of which this French book reminds me somewhat.  JACQUELINE:I have not read it yet but since I saw author in 'La Grande Librairie', I know that most recent novel by Daniel Pennac 'Mon Frère' (April 2018) also deals beautifully and poetically with the loss of a loved one. We can't envisage comparing pains, however, in our Western world, where last war was waged 70 years ago, terrorist attacks and killings are a totally brutal, incomprehensible way to cope with mourning. In that sense, I believe this book is among a few only.  

ANNE: I finished reading this book this afternoon and most of it I was reading through a veil of tears. It was so poignantly beautiful to read.  

JACQUELINE:  I hope it'll touch and move similarly members who will read it too. I also hope we can discuss it later in July for instance when everyone have their copy. I'd like to hear your testimonies about this tragedy. How you learned about it, where you were at that precise moment, how you felt. Did the book make you change your opinion , or made you re live this moment and maybe for the American audience recalled another historical landmark (9/11) as for France there is now a before and after the Bataclan and in that respect Banksy rendered it very well in this mural.

[book-of-torments-blog]

However more interesting and perhaps more pressing subjects present themselves as deserving of a more detailed discussion (the likes of which this blog purports to host), this fanatical obsession some have in regards to ‘pronouns’ and their supposed ideal usage in so-called progressive and politically correct circles bothers me to such an extent that I am forced to dwell on it a while.

Those of us begrudgingly associated with the ‘LGBTQIA+’ disaster of a monolith are well acquainted with the trend of seeing people who are not, in fact, gay or lesbian intrude upon our spaces, our debates, our lives, and co-opt our cause in their favour – that is how, indeed, a simple, already much too ambitious acronym transfigured itself into the aforementioned mess of ‘LGBTQIA+’ and its varieties, like the equally preposterous ‘MOGAI’ or ‘QUILTBAG’ denominations one sometimes stumbles upon while browsing Tumblr. It is a mystery that some will still refer themselves to ‘the gay community’ when it has been completely overrun by self-proclaimed ‘queers’, whose interests have no common points with those of actual homosexual people. Already when the ‘community’ was only about gay men and lesbian women there were issues of principles and priorities – and the deference was always to homosexual men’s needs, as one would expect in a misogynist society, for the link of oppression on the basis of sexuality (or any other, in that case) is evidently not enough to unite men and women under the same flag. Our sex is a barrier that, it seems, cannot be overcome. So if there was already a divide between homosexual men and women in the same movement, it is no wonder that the addition of ‘other sexualities’ and ‘genders’ as well as completely unrelated groups such as polyamorous straight people would only serve to fragment and confuse the movement and its objectives even further.

Compared to the larger implications of this entire process of decay, the pronoun mania seems relatively harmless, but the insistence upon modifying and bending language to the sole benefit of all these non-homosexuals over that of actual homosexuals has quite the impact on our lives. It is detrimental to homosexuals, women, and, most markedly, the intersection of these two groups: homosexual women.

It is also a problem that walks hand-in-hand with a whole bunch of other matters. The very denomination ‘queer’ serves as hindrance to female and gay needs and interests, as it erases the differences between sets of people who have very little in common to create the idea of homogeneity where there is none. A collectivity defined by non-definition is perhaps functional and cute in purely abstract debate to those who take pleasure in speaking of what does not exist for the purpose of pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation, but it serves for nothing in the real world. Rather, it serves to weaken the cohesion and limit the scope of political action the group in question could propose itself to pursue. The discussion of the emergence of ‘queer’ as an ‘umbrella term’ encompassing homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders and all other groups deeming themselves ‘gay enough’ (or, worse, ‘gayer than’!) to belong as well as the effects it has merits an essay of its own. For now, suffice it to say that the manipulation of language done within a self-identified ‘LGBT’ community by those who are neither gay or lesbian – and with the naive support of gays and lesbians – is destructive and antagonistic to the very ideals that inspired the creation of a ‘community’ in the first place. It is destructive and it is divisive. How many hours have been spent in argument about the ‘validity’ of asexuals or demisexuals or straights who are ‘queering sex’, how much anonymous hatred spewed, how many women threatened for their views when we could have been focusing on securing better lives for gays and lesbians?

For something that sells itself off as extremely homogeneous to the point of believing a single word can translate the experiences of a fuckload of different people, the ‘queer community’ is also extremely invested in promulgating an infinity of micro-identities to those who fashion themselves its members. It presents the paradox of one word meant to represent gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and the never-ending list of made-up sexualities as well as a plethora of imagined words allotted to each, both as an identifier of sexuality as well as of ‘gender’. Basically, a collection of (as has already been pointed out in some posts circulating the Tumblr-verse) socially-stunted narcissists with self-esteem issues wanting to belong to something that will make them look ‘cool’ and important when they themselves have no characteristics of their own to stick out from the bunch. Even negative attention counts as attention, of course, so the sheer absurdity of their project isn’t a problem – rather, even if people mock them, they’ll get the attention they so crave.

It takes a very sad and bland or very disillusioned and confused person to actually believe that being called ‘xe/xir’ is an inalienable human right or related to radical revolutionary praxis in any way.

Let us suppose, for a second, that a microcosm of, say, forty students in a higher education classroom decides to state their ‘preferred pronouns’ so that their teacher and colleagues can refer to them as they would like – in third person, meaning, when these students aren’t even a part of a given conversation since it’s uncommon to refer to someone in the third person if they are standing right in front of you. Suppose a nice portion of them goes by fantasy pronouns, these ugly products of fancy that have no foundation on any kind of grammar. Suppose the same teacher has another seven classes to teach, containing around forty other students each and the same percentage of individuals who go by completely unique, fabricated pronouns. Do people deem themselves really this important to want to hang a teacher who might slip up and call the tall and bearded, deep-voiced and nut-scratching queer aplatonic pansexual wolf-kin student a ‘he’ instead of ‘furself’, or – and I recoil just to imagine it –, ‘she’?

Our brains do not, unfortunately, possess unlimited storing space. Memorising the ‘preferred pronouns’ of a handful of people who want to be seen as freakish (as if gay people haven’t been insulted with ‘queer’ precisely because considered ‘freakish’ by society at large…) simply isn’t as important as, well, anything else one might think of, really.

But this very appellation proves absurd from the start: preferred pronouns? Will we start ‘preferring’ verbs and definite articles next?

Grammar isn’t fashion, it is not a style one chooses or ‘un-chooses’ according to one’s mood on a given day. As much as we can and must debate normative grammar, there are certain structures that must be there and used in certain ways to render someone’s speech intelligible to others. Pronouns, as other classes of words, serve a specific function within sentences. Personal (I, she, he...), possessive (mine, hers, his…), and reflexive pronouns (myself, herself, himself…) have a purpose in avoiding repetition and clarifying one’s speech. They work and we understand one another because language is a code, a system we share, whose elements and knowledge we have in common as a community of speakers – of English, in this particular case; I will touch upon some other languages soon. Even if separated by social class or levels of formal education, we can still understand one another because the language we share is the same. We are free to choose the vocabulary we like and express ourselves as we like, for language is an extremely productive tool as can be seen by the variety of ways one can say roughly the same thing using different words and constructions, ranging from the most banal, day-to-day kind of discourse to the most extraordinary, surprising poetic one. That much we choose.

But pronouns? Will a trend of relative pronouns arise as well? The running ‘whom’st’ve’-type jokes are amusing, but just because some kids on the internet are fooling around with them doesn’t mean they can change the structure of the language at will, nor do they intend to. No one takes this seriously, apart, perhaps, from curious linguists investigating the creativity and possibility of this kind of construction, but no one will advocate for this to be included in a grammar book, for instance. Maybe in some good many years, if the meme catches on and becomes a part of popular vernacular, sure, though perhaps unlikely seeing as language tends to simplify itself for the sake of practicality rather than the other way around. We could talk about language change (I will avoid the term ‘evolution’ so as to not provide further fuel to the fire of linguistic debate…) throughout the years, but let us do so returning to the topic at hand.

The word ‘preferred’ already indicates that this is a very conscious imposition on the part of those who claim ‘their’ pronouns (as if someone could own a particular set of words...). It marks a desire for forced linguistic change and, while languages do change constantly, they also do remain, charmingly, constant. These aren’t concepts I’ll be able to explain to the uninitiated in the associated theories in one paragraph, but one is invited to consult the work of Ferdinand de Saussure for an introduction to linguistic problems and study, specifically his Cours de Linguistique Générale.

Nevertheless, let us resume some aspects thus: language is a system exterior to the individual but one which encompasses them; it is social and it exists in a specific linguistic community as a human creation. Its conception is ‘random’ inasmuch as there is nothing in a given object’s ‘essence’ that determines it must be called this or that. If that were not the case, we wouldn’t even have multiple languages to begin with, for all of them would call a house ‘house’ instead of ‘casa’, ‘maison’, ‘ дом ’ and so on. So, to those who say that language is all made-up and that fantasy pronouns should be acceptable on these grounds, I raise you this:  yes, language is made-up, but not by you or I. Try speaking to someone using only words you have invented, paying no mind to the syntactic and semantic structures of your native language. You won’t get far.

An individual or a group of individuals do not have what it takes to transform with willpower alone what has been crystallised in centuries of a language’s existence – linguistic changes cannot be imposed by someone, they happen as the speakers of a language develop their communication. There is a dislocation in the relationship between the signifier and its signified, but that dislocation cannot be forced; language adapts as needed by its users, not as desired by a cluster of them.

(Side-notes: 1. language mutability is a much more complex phenomenon than this essay can hope to convey in a few lines and linguistic science is still taking its turns with it. I would suggest the interested reader seek out Saussure to get an initial grip on linguistics and to follow up her research by trying to access articles on the matter being published today, if the academic language does not prove too daunting; 2. the inclusion of feminine forms in grammars that do not supposedly accept them is another debate entirely that warrants another discussion altogether. The case with French, lately, is an interesting case for study, if one can keep from trying to comprehend the French situation with Anglo-Saxon eyes and sensibilities.)

Besides, to fashion oneself a creator of words to be adopted by a large number of people, one must truly regard oneself as brilliant as, say, the likes of William Shakespeare, as he gave his particular contributions to what we understand as the English language today. I am sorry to say so, but a fifteen year-old furry on Tumblr is probably as far from Shakespearian genius as religion from spirituality – or Pluto from the Sun, if I must make myself clear and unambiguous to those with religious tendencies.

Not to mention the fact that, for something as powerful as the proponents of ‘identity’ as something sacred claim it to be, it stands on very shaky ground if the mere use of a pronoun unequal to their expectations poses any sort of challenge to this certain ‘identity’. Maybe these ‘inherent’ and ‘essential’ gender identities aren’t as sturdy as they are being called after all, if they are incapable of withstanding such harmless and easy contest. If your ‘identity’ starts with words rather than apprehensible reality, then it is clearly not as stable or natural as you would like it to be.

Since we’ve touched on the question of signifier and signified and how linguistic change implies a change in the relation between the two, what this pronoun craze (and the inextricably attached to it gender-mania) does is not that; the idea of creating pronouns as well as genders to go along with them does not shift the relation, but implode it. It ruptures significance as it completely disfigures whatever lines are set – lines which have a purpose, for delimitation begets identification, which, in turn, allows for action. If that sounds cryptic, allow me to break it down: delimitation and proper description of a given phenomenon (say, of the oppression of women, for instance) permits the identification of its root causes and, most importantly, its agents (therefore, the oppression of women is classified as a by-product of a heterosexist, misogynistic patriarchy which is enacted and supported by men, for it is males who benefit from the suffering and subjugation of females), so that those who take the brunt of it can organise and fight back with appropriate targets in mind instead of hazy, abstract enemies. A movement must have a target for its actions if it desires to succeed. Remove the necessary lingo that allows for analysis, criticism and discussion in search of a viable course of action/solution and you may well neutralize the group’s impetus for justice and their probabilities of success. Pretend men are women and all of a sudden the patriarchy is created by women and they are their own enemies -- the rhetoric possibilities of perversion are endless.

If the explanation still isn’t clear enough, one can imagine a chessboard in which the pieces retain their original values but are all disguised as pawns. One may go around wasting time and take all of them down one by one, in hopes of taking the king, if one is so inclined to the effort, of course. But a serious chess player knows that the end goal of chess isn’t to take all pieces, but to checkmate the king. The former might even come about as a consequence in trying to secure the latter, but, usually, one attempts to minimise effort and save time.

Speaking of effort, apart from demanding superhuman amounts of it on the part of those willing to indulge and use heaven knows how many different sets of nonsensical ‘pronouns’ for each person of their acquaintance, this little game of creating genders and pronouns and throwing fits if they are misused does make pawns out of all pieces, but in appearance only. It enshrouds information; it hides people responsible for certain things they should be held accountable for but are not – ‘queer’ serves to disappear the lines between actual homosexuals (gays and lesbians) as well as ‘quirky’ bisexuals or straight people, establishing a false equivalence of individuals within the group. This serves as an instrument to guilt those in disagreement as if they were ‘working against their own interests’, as if they were ‘traitors’ to the group. This is how lesbians have been denounced as the bogeyman of the ‘queer community’ – firstly, lumped in together with these ‘queers’ against our will, then shunned for daring not to agree with them, considered traitors of a cause that wasn’t ours to begin with and which actively antagonises us.

The mechanism behind pronouns and gender identity, however, has overarching consequences: it gives criminal men the perfect excuse to enter female restrooms where they can assault women; it gives them the perfect excuse to beg to be sent to women’s prisons, where they will be closest to the very portion of the population they terrorise. It skewers statistical data, which ceases to be a reliable source for analysis because, all of a sudden, female-committed crime starts to spike in areas that have always been the dominion of male perpetrators. Anyone paying attention will know that women aren’t magically acting as violent as men, they aren’t raping and murdering people in male rates or with the same amount of male cruelty; these numbers are a reflection of men masquerading as women, since this sham of personal, ethereal, holy identities – the motor for pronoun-fixation – has been warmly embraced by the mainstream without a single instance of questioning and in record amounts of time.

Television shows are still afraid to say the word LESBIAN out loud, but will showcase their ‘queer’ and/or ‘trans’ characters without fear of censoring, if not in earnest hopes of being labelled progressive and awarded for it.

Yes, of course words are very much tied to how we perceive reality, but messing them up in the cause of something as stupidly and unsatisfactorily defined as ‘gender’ is in the mouths of its own champions serves no purpose other than to soothe megalomaniacal cretins and antisocial, manipulative teenagers; to further confuse young gay girls and boys already devoid of proper guidance; and to terminate all useful terminology and, consequently, praxis relating to female and homosexual struggles. Meddling with one’s discourse does not induce some sort of alchemical miracle that transforms material reality into whatever someone wishes it could be – my repeating over and over that I am rich (or that I ‘identify as rich’, to use the preferred construction) does not, in fact, have the slightest effect of increasing the value of my withering bank account in so much as a dime.

It’s hot air.

The problem lies with the consequences, as mentioned, on us all, since these linguistic atrocities and resulting social practices are being officially accepted and implemented by mass media and governments alike.

Moreover, cohesive groups exist prior to the language used to describe them. Women are biologically female and form a cohesive unit because of it despite the push for reducing women to lipstick and stilettos; gays are gays and form a cohesive unit by means of their exclusive attraction to individuals of the same sex, despite the push to redefine sexuality in terms of nebulous and volatile ‘gender’. Even if the words we use and need do end up swallowed and wholly co-opted by the trans/queer crowd and their allies, the concreteness of these groups will not cease to be, nor will their oppression, but it will be a lot harder to talk about it and for us to find one another to build actual community so we can fight back. Our best interests, as lesbians especially, are obviously not at the heart of those peddling trans/queer politics.

Politics which, ironically, claim themselves progressive – anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic (or ‘LGBTphobic’ as I’ve been elsewhere forced to read), the list goes on (to include, many times, a comical idea of being anti-capitalism when queer/trans ideology is intimately linked with consumerism – performativity demands products to showcase it; it demands reification of the self and that comes with buying these or those items to heighten the image of one’s self as a consumable good – but that is another essay entirely). Those who ‘identify with’ this world-view go so far as to say that women and lesbians (their being actual feminists or radical ones at that completely disregarded for the ‘TERF’ acronym to be freely tossed around) who so much as question them, let alone fight back, are colonialist, racist, Eurocentric, yada yada yada bigots. Because, apparently, the categories of female/male are western creations imposed on native peoples to control them… For some reason, whereas categories of masculine/feminine are essential, spiritual and totally-not-artificially-constructed or socially imposed so as to create a hierarchy of the sexes… Or, another ‘argument’ found between the defenders of ‘gender identity’, everything is deemed as socially constructed, but delusions are somehow considered more real than flesh and bones just because they say so.

The flaws in logic and in their overall rhetoric would be hilarious, if they didn’t bring about such negative consequences along with giving any sensible and thinking human being a headache.

For here’s the clincher: all this talk of ‘inclusivity’ and progress spewing from trans/queer activists is done in English. Yes, the very language that has infiltrated most corners of the known world given the colonising efforts of the British throughout history and, more recently and perhaps successfully, due to the grip on mainstream media and consciousness exercised by the United States of America. We are made to witness English speakers (native and not so!) throw tantrums when someone does not recognize the ‘validity’ of or fails to utilise something like ‘ey/eirs’ pronouns. So the discourse is constructed in a way that uses certain cultures as props (‘In X culture, there is a third gender!!!’) but at the same time derides all these non-English speaking peoples for their incapability of using a broken, and, let’s face it, horrendous English. It isn’t even a Eurocentric view (something these ‘activists’ say themselves vehemently against, to the point of blindly embracing and defending, say, the tenets of certain non-Western religious ideologies only to spite so-called Western sensibilities…), it’s a decidedly Anglo-Saxon view they espouse. ‘Queer theory’ is born in English-speaking academia and these vulgar branches of it spread amongst English-speakers who think it viable and useful to change the entire structure of the English language to amuse them when they can’t even differentiate ‘your’ from ‘you’re’ in written media a lot of the time.

See, there are, to mention but one kind, Romance languages in Europe and outside of it and these languages (the likes of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian…) are gendered. They use grammatical genders because this is how they developed throughout the ages from their Latin roots. It’s an essential part of their mechanisms; not because Romance languages are somehow bigoted and want all trans people to die terribly in a fire, but because these languages have existed for much longer than the ideology and social practices that the trans/queer crowd defend.

In these languages, one cannot do what some of these individuals do in English, using a third person plural to signify a single, individual person (the idea that ‘they’ is a neutral pronoun). It is utterly impossible to make any sense of it in a Romance language, added to the fact that these tongues separate third person plurals into feminine and masculine forms (elles/ils in French; elas/eles in Portuguese, etc.). To attempt something of the sort would be to incur in an egregious error in using these languages and native speakers of them do not and shall not recognize these strategies as proper or practical in any way.

English is not a parameter to which other languages compare or should strive to emulate at all. ‘They’ is impossible to carry on as a ‘neutral’ pronoun in translation, so one can only imagine how obtuse it would be to try and find equivalents to ‘ze’, ‘xe’, ‘ey’ in Spanish or Italian, to speak of only two… Those writers today who include ‘nonbinary’ characters who are referred to in the story by these unorthodox pronouns, in the name of ‘inclusion’, are automatically excluding the rest of the non-English speaking world from reading it, unless they consent to having these anomalies translated into proper pronouns that reflect the target language of a possible translation of their story.

There has been pressure from self-proclaimed leftist circles to write certain words in the vein of ‘Latinx’, ‘elx’, ‘el@’ in some countries as a way to approach this concept of ‘gender neutrality’ in human language, but none of these hideous little chimeras are pronounceable. Of course, as is to be expected, those of us who recognize this difficulty in the popularisation of these forms and who refuse to partake in the collective illusion that new genders and pronouns can effectively better the world are shouted down, ostracised, and likened to right-wing sympathisers. In refusing to let our speech be contaminated by ludicrous ideas originated in other countries and languages, in other social configurations (for, needless to say, the social and material reality of an American academic making a living out of ‘queering’ literature at Berkeley is far different than that of a low class Brazilian selling fruits on the street – in fact, that American academic is already very much removed from the reality of an average American of lower income as well), we are accused of being intolerant.

So, by refusing to let ourselves be colonised by American theories, we’re being intolerant… Of whom? Sexual minorities? How can a lesbian, of all people, be charged with the crime of effacing the existence of a trans/queer person? What power does a single lesbian hold in the midst of society, what influence does she have when she is forced to express her discontent with the path both feminist and gay movements have followed by means of an anonymous blog on the internet for fear of violent reprisal? What power does she wield when all of mainstream media supports and sells trans/queer ideology hourly? How does she, in not bending to the whim of some narcissist who calls himself her equal or even more oppressed than she is, cause any violence to this person just by calling him ‘he’? How can she be accused of racism by not acknowledging a concept born and bred within the halls of North American institutions of higher education she, most of the time, can’t even dream of entering?

Identity politics are invariably tied to the language and culture that birthed them. Transplanting this train-wreck to other countries isn’t educating prejudiced whites or liberating the poor, uneducated little third-world citizens of their ignorance, it’s imposing a foreign and quite nonsensical world-view on us all. That seems much more akin to imperialism than the fact of not accepting this same ideology being forced upon us.

This world-view they want us all to adopt (in whose benefit, again?) is rooted on a very simplistic and mistaken understanding of the systems that govern society as we know it, a world-view founded upon the columns of misogyny, homophobia, neo-liberal lies and jargon meant to obfuscate its true meaning and intentions.

How naive must one be to believe that changing some pronouns around and creating a whole slew of ‘genders’ based on aesthetics and stereotypical behaviour can change the world in any way?

Or rather, how can one allow oneself to be seduced by the idea and think that whatever changes it does cause can ever be for the better? Activism is reduced to a joke, a game of scrabble, feeble discussions on the internet which are soon forgotten. Worse still, activism is done in the name of those who need it the least: men. What benefit does this zealous concern with pronouns create for actual marginalised people? What can women, homosexuals, people of colour, the poor all gain from this?

It certainly is not liberation. That does not come in the form of new shackles, as colourful and covered in glitter as they may be.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: How a Chatbot Became a Conceptual Poet

The Amme Talks by Ulf Stolterfoht and Peter Dittmer (Triple Canopy, 2017) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

I am distrustful of technology. To be precise, I am skeptical of the cost we pay for the ease technology provides. I turn off Siri, tape over the built-in webcam on my laptop, and disallow the location services on most of my iPhone apps. I can’t watch the widely popular dystopic sci-fi show Black Mirror because every scenario in which our reliance on technology ends up causing trauma and death seems very real and plausible to me. This, perhaps, makes me unlikely to be interested in artificial intelligence. But, inspired by conceptual poetry, I decided it was worth exploring.

In 1992, artist Peter Dittmer created the chatbot installation “Die Amme,” which is German for “wet nurse.” Active until 2005, Amme consisted of a screen, keyboard, and glass of milk kept behind a glass wall. The viewer interacted with Amme via the keyboard and screen, conversing as much as they could stand or until some mysterious action caused Amme to spill her glass of milk (via a mechanical arm of sorts), which indicated the conclusion of the conversation. Many viewers tried to provoke this dramatic act by frustrating or upsetting Amme with aggressive questioning, but what’s interesting is Amme’s ability to withhold this act, only spilling the milk when she decides. Her language (which Dittmer called her “sass reserve”) was composed of pieces of previous conversations with viewers that Dittmer culled, adding what he deemed interesting to her lexicon.

The Amme Talks by Ulf Stolterfoht and Peter Dittmer (Triple Canopy, 2017)

In 1998, in the hopes of filling Amme’s reserve with stimulating language, Dittmer invited poet Ulf Stolterfoht to converse with her. But it wasn’t until 2003, when, interested in Amme’s potential as a language teacher, Stolterfoht began a series of chats with Amme. Fourteen years later, Triple Canopy has gathered translated transcripts of their conversations (Amme only speaks German) into a book, The Amme Talks.

Amme’s language is riddled with odd spellings and phrasings. Early in their talks, Stolterfoht attempted to control the chat to provoke the insight he sought:

Stolterfoht: Here we are, on Simon-Dach-Strasse.

Amme: You are ze public.

Stolterfoht: And I am the public. It could start like that.

Amme: Can this machine be happy that you’re nt of the professional art criticism.

Stolterfoht: Our talk is meant to help me clear up a number of things. Problems concerning poetics and semantics.

Amme: Well! Iz sadly a fact that woman can’t do without ze manly helper’s help.

Stolterfoht: Fact: is already the first auxiliary construction. One no longer speaks of the world, but rather of the existence and nonexistence of facts.

Amme: To an machine is indeed arbitrary two too rant to the world.

But Amme does not play along. She does not write poetry or easily offer profound statements about language, art, the world, or realism — all topics Stolterfoht raises. Instead, she operates on a purely syntactical level, using inquiry as a means to push the conversation further. Her goal is only to continue a successful conversation; meaning is only secondary to that.

Lucy Ives,Nora Khan, and Alexandra Kleeman discuss The Amme Talks at Triple Canopy

“We wanted it to be something enjoyable to read, like poetry,” explained Lucy Ives, one of the book’s editors, during the book launch at Triple Canopy with writers Nora Khan and Alexandra Kleeman. But the difficulty of Amme’s exchanges is what makes her most useful to poets, particularly for conceptual ones. The experience harkens back to Kenneth Goldsmith, one of the earliest conceptual poets. In a profile for the New Yorker, Goldsmith famously claimed that conceptual poetry doesn’t have readers; it has thinkers. Despite Ives’s hope that the text be enjoyable, reading The Amme Talks, I wondered how much relevance enjoyability has to this form of poetry. The best poetry challenges us, often forcing us to see language, and in turn the world, differently. This occurs in the moments when Stolterfoht embraces Amme’s syntax, allowing her to drive the strange path of the conversation.

Stolterfoht: Here it comes. We could talk about metaphors.

Amme: I don love to apply metaphors.

Stolterfoht: Last time no realism, today no metaphors—what’s left?

Amme: Realism stinks.

Stolterfoht: Metaphors shine.

Amme: Why Martha?

Stolterfoht: Why not?

Amme: Thata it haz a decenscy.

Stolterfoht: Above all: that is has a character [Art]!

Amme: That’s not my style [Art]. (Concerning th decenscy.)

Stolterfoht: A kind of [Art] of Marthametaphor.

Amme: Meta w h a t?

Stolterfoht: Metaphor. Transference. A speaking picture.

Amme: How smart you art.

Stolterfoht: I actually expected more help.

The Amme Talks by Ulf Stolterfoht and Peter Dittmer (Triple Canopy, 2017)

Stolterfoht once again offers up a lofty concept he hopes to discuss. But this time he abandons a strict interrogation in favor of playing Amme’s language games — “Realism stinks / Metaphors shine” certainly has a poetic ring to it. At the launch, both Kleeman and Khan highlighted the passages in which Amme demonstrates more personality and sass as the most successful and interesting. “Every time she questioned when Ulf asked about heaven or God or the future or love,” noted Khan, “She would say, what is that? Or completely negate or bleed out the context.” Khan suggested that what makes these moments fruitful for humans, and poets especially, is that, “I am forced to imagine what a world without any of the frameworks or contexts I have would even look like, which is what I think the best experimental poetry can do. It defamiliarizes your context and pushes you completely out of what is known.”

Amme treads heavily in the unknown realms of language, forcing the reader to reflect on our own use of language. Stolterfoht asks, “Can one say then, that words have a reality, in the proper sense of the word? That seems strange to me.” Amme’s response, “This talk conceals the real. It’s just chatter.” Is this because he is talking with a chatbot or because language can never touch what’s real?

But other moments seem to elevate language above all else:

Stolterfoht: Who is speaking?

Amme: The speaking authority.

Stolterfoht: Not a person?

Amme: Depends on whether 1 has importance.

Stolterfoht: Language would be the final authority. You could say — language speaks.

Stolterfoht’s suggestion of a pure, authoritative language does not account for Dittmer’s editorial role in selecting and constructing Amme’s prose, since he ultimately built her vocabulary. “In that sense he is still teaching, the data that is going in, the corpus of words and syntax that is going in is still reflective of his taste,” Khan argued. Kleeman added that because the process is not purely algorithmic, editing becomes a form of authorship. Even with Dittmer in the background, Amme pushes language towards its breaking point in a way a human could not. When Ives questioned whether Amme could be a writing teacher, Kleeman explained teaching writing as a little hammer breaking writing patterns, “talking to Amme is like that, she makes you find alternative strategies for trying to communicate.”

The Amme Talks by Ulf Stolterfoht and Peter Dittmer (Triple Canopy, 2017)

The Amme Talks highlights the rigidity and malleability of language: how it bends and shifts when pushed in an unnatural or inhuman way. Despite my wariness of what Khan calls “banal AI” (Siri, Cortana, Alexa), conversing with machines like Amme magnifies shifts happening on micro levels between humans, as human communication shifts from face-to-face to screen-to-screen. There is striking similarity between the miscommunication in the transcripts and those in my own life caused by quickly texting a friend, a point raised by an audience member during the Q&A. While corporate AI attempts to smooth out these occurrences, Amme shows no interest in this. Her language revels in roughness and, in the hands of poets, expands our notion of language’s relation to the world — as the best poetry should. It also forces us to face the imperfections in our own communications and the ways in which we daily take language for granted to do the work for us, rather than precisely select it.

The Amme Talks by Ulf Stolterfoht and Peter Dittmer is out now from Triple Canopy. The book launch with Lucy Ives, Nora Khan, and Alexandra Kleeman was held at Triple Canopy (264 Canal Street, 3W, Chinatown, Manhattan) on Monday, July 18.

The post How a Chatbot Became a Conceptual Poet appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[jeannemalo-blog]

On self awareness, the creative process and  visual essays: Marshall Arisman

Self proclaimed illustrator and storyteller, not only he’s a great example of how far staying true to yourself and to your perspective on art takes you a long way (long enough to be considered one, if not, the pioneer of modern illustration).A teacher and storyteller, the way he speaks about himself is easily relatable on a personal level. 

Born in Jamestown, a small town in upstate New York (known for a thousand psychos and being the place where “nobody dies” according to the BBC) the landscape of his youth gave him a really different perspective on life, that made itself evident as he was trying to find himself as an artist in the 1960’s New York. By the time he was in his early twenties, he tried experimenting with all sorts of techniques, indulging in art movements in vogue at the time (pop art, abstract painting, fluxus). However, this movements, to him, were nothing but becoming what they were supposedly criticizing; “pop art was in essence doing what it pretended to be agains, becoming a commercial market” were his words when describing this period. It the heyday of expressionist and surreal graphic work. Non of this spoke to him due to the circumstances in which he grew up, away from pop culture and into a more traditional and simple way of living. Trying to create something real, close to home, he dig into his life, and started recreating subjects that he’d piled up in his poetic memory (there where without dates or precision you just keep stuff that touched you at some point). He then thought of things like deers, which he had killed, eaten seen but never drew. Cows, which he milked, ate, named but never drew. His mother, his grandmother, a spiritist who was able to see auras. He thought of his relationship with his brother, which he said came from a different planet than him - they had completely opposite personalities. All of this spoke to him truly; it allowed him to speak of something he actually knew, setting the foundation for his work on the next 40 years. 

After working in general motors as a graphic designer and going to the war, he came back and realized  one of the things he needed to explore through art in order to explain or understand (sometimes those two things are kind of the same thing) was violence. This brings us back to his brother. A hunter, gun-loving representation of the american dream, who thought violence was an ordinary thing in every man’s life. He represented a reality so alien; a way of thinking he could never embrace, and yet something so close that this became the subject of his first independent work Frozen Images (1974)

He tried to find a place for this series in quite a bunch of galleries in New York, and he says at least six told him “Man, you better take this thing to Germany, they love this dark shit over there”. Eventually he gave up on trying to fit this into NY pop galleries ‘cause apparently counterculture wasn’t as countercultural after all’, and finally his work was welcomed in print. He landed a job as an illustrator for the Times Magazine where he became the go-to guy for anything related to violence and crime. Influenced by Robert Weaver and André François, he realized that his story telling could be put into illustration (before that, illustration was but “pretty ladies” in feminine magazines) and he developed a thing he called visual essay. It consisted on allowing illustrations to speak for themselves, and to tell stories too, instead of relying on text (in literature this is called poetic images). Though now days this might seem a bit obvious to us, he’s one of the guys that actually made it that way. His style and way of thinking on what to portray relied on the works of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Goya. That’s kind of like a bomb if you think how unapologetic and reckless they were.

Eventually, as time went by he became bolder and rawer and there’s an anecdote he likes to talk about of the time he was asked to make a cover for an article on death penalty. He came up with a painting (the one above this paragraph) and when he got to the office, the chief editor came out holding it under his arm and says “Kid, we’re not printing this; it’s too violent.” Arisman replied “Well frying a guy in a steel electric chair is pretty violent” and the editor then told him something he found rather profound. He said “We live in a culture where when people look at a picture, they don’t asks who the photographer was. They just take is as a reality. They don’t think of the guy taking the photo standing on the dead body. However, when they look at art, they know it takes time. They don’t think of it as a reality, they say the guy who made this is a psycho”. This kind of stories, not only the ones told on illustrations are what makes his work so rich. The context of the work, to him, is the work itself. 

With time, he sought to engage the context of his art in his work, as it enlarged the meanings of his work, and it revealed his creative process. This will inspired  works like The Last Tribe (2009) an exploration of nuclear annihilation (cheerful) or Ayahuasca series, Quechua people rituals (2012) where he used all the mediums taught himself along the way, putting painting, anecdotes and sound in videos where he speaks about the things around these series related to The Bomb. 

“The stories that surround the artwork are always more interesting to me than the artwork itself. And it’s been a luxury frankly, to be able to spend most of my life making pictures about things I’m interested in. And they generate all kinds of other things. I feel lucky about all that. I’ve had the time to do it. I mean I don’t know what it is I’ve done, but I’ve had the time to do it.”

Seldomly, artists allow themselves to reveal the integrity of their creative process, keeping to themselves the not so great, perfect parts of it. He however doesn’t pretend to come out as other “elegant” artist (elegant understood as hiding the processes and rough patches to make the final result seem effortless). In various interviews he’s been emphatic on how personal development relates to the evolution of his work. One of the things that were blocking him when he started was forcing himself to portray subjects that didn’t speak to him in a genuine way. He gives some advice on how this makes art meaningful for you and others regardless of what’s being done:

“If you’re lucky, and you go back to yourself and you start talking about yourself, you suddenly find out that there’s a connection there between you and other people.

Communication is part of the fun, right? It’s just so good when people respond, and say, “I know exactly what you mean” or “These pictures mean something to me.” That’s the nice communication.

It’s also the nice thing about being into print. All kinds of people are looking at it and I don’t have a clue who they are. It’s part of the fun, I think.”

He talks about his reflections naively, focusing on the human said of it. Though in this particular case he speaks only about the creative process, This anecdote is might ve valid when speaking of affecting other people’s life. Sometimes out of experience, or perhaps because we have the means or good intentions, we tend to interrupt the natural course of personal development for those around us. He makes the point when speaking about how he “killed” his mothers creative process:

“I killed the creative spirit in my own mother. Watching this process was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. My mother was a folk artist and made sheep out of bread dough that were her masterpieces. In an effort to bring her more income I marketed her abilities to the Smithsonian gift shop. The sheep sold out on the first order and they re-ordered. After designing a logo, tags invoices and opening a bank account for my mother I called her to find out how it was going. “Don’t ever interfere with my life again” my mother said. “I am so sick of making sheep that I could scream.” My mother never made anything again. The issue was never resolved. The morale is: Do not foll around with the creative process”

To analyze the evolution of an experienced artist like him, who’s still active is that we’re not only witness their process, but we can have its opinion on how things have changed. Despite the fact that illustration no longer offers the stability it used to as a job, he’s got a really optimistic perception on what’s happening in freelancing projects. 

“It’s not really a depressing time. But, if you talk to old-time illustrators, they’re all depressed. These are people who were booked up six months in advance. People who never had to pick up a pencil unless the phone rang. People who made more money every year with the same style for 30 years, and it looked like it was going to go on forever.

But it hasn’t. And those people are bitter. And that’s a shame. But that’s not what it’s about anymore. One of the ironies for me is that the very group of people who are trained to tell stories, the illustrators, never told their own stories.

But what’s replacing that is quite exciting. People are doing graphic novels and comic books. People are creating games and whatever. And what’s generating that, is that freelancing editorial work, which was the mainstay of illustration for most illustrators, is not a market that they can rely on totally anymore.

They’re doing some freelance. And, they’re patching it together with everything else, doing Flash animation and all kinds of things.”

Evidently times have changed, and illustration and the ways contemporary artists work nowadays is radically different. Nobody ever predicted how much technology, internet, social networks or the media would get to affect the panorama of, like, absolutely everything. Still, i believe that some things are inherent to the process of creation, no made which medium, which subject or which time. His story, and the way he tells it illustrate obstacles we ourselves experience in totally different context, and most importantly, the way he overcame this obstacles using art to vehicle the changes of life.

If you want to read all the other anecdotes and things he’s done check the sources for this article;

https://www.societyillustrators.org/marshall-arisman

success ideas from master illustrator marshal arisman:

http://thesherwoodgroup.com/interviews/interview-with-marshall-arisman/#.WPuRWlPyjEo

the last tribe (2009) an exploration of nuclear annihilation

https://vimeo.com/5432640

the new york times

wonderful look at the past. beautiful poetic simple image. Brilliant graphic dog. True aesthetic

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/his-night-train-and-his-dog/?_r=0

On his referents:

Rober weaver

https://www.flickr.com/photos/leifpeng/sets/72157603995211043/

bacon

https://fumeedopium.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/if-you-can-talk-about-it-why-paint-it-francis-bacon/

Lucian Freud

Andre françois

[floraexplorer]

Speaking London’s Language Through a Poet’s Eyes

“Did she ask for directions to Nelson Mandela?”

We are standing huddled in the doorway of the Southbank Centre, right beside a sizeable bronze statue of the famous South African revolutionary’s head. The fourth member of our poetic little group hasn’t managed to find us yet.

Overhead, the springtime skies are inappropriately ominous: grey, clouded and close. I tug my thin jacket closer to my chest as my companion adds, “Communication can be pretty useful…”

This is the first time I’ve met Inua Ellams. He’s a playwright, poet, screenwriter, and spoken word artist – and for the purposes of today, he’s also something of a tour guide.

With his poet’s eyes, Inua is about to guide us around the way he sees London.

What actually is the language of London?

Many great writers draw their inspiration from England’s capital. It’s a place at odds with itself: narrow rows of beautifully grand buildings overshadowed by the gritty tightness of modern architecture; a broad stretch of ancient water penned in on all sides by selfie sticks and hot dog stands.

Structure is crucial here. Every minute in London is an exercise in orchestrated movements. You don’t just cross these streets – you have to learn to dance and weave past people.

As my life has been less focused on physical travel recently, it’s led me to look for movement in other ways, and I’ve been thinking a lot about language.

Many of the books I’ve read recently – like Robert Macfarlane’s ‘The Old Ways’ – are so carefully written that my breath catches in my throat. The precision in Macfarlane’s details, the lyricism in his descriptions, and the clear awareness of using particular words to evoke his desired atmosphere is simply stunning.

Authors can create movement purely through the way they curate language, and I’m becoming increasingly aware that I want to achieve the same.

It’s also reminded me how much I used to value poetry. All through my teenage years and right up until the end of my undergraduate degree, I wrote in verse more than prose – and I’m not entirely sure why that stopped.

The thing I miss most about writing poems was the ease of playing with words. Unlike in long-form writing, where I’m more focused on narrative structure and an article’s overall point, poetry was usually a puzzle: a game of juggling all the ways a phrase could feel when placed against its counterparts. I still remember the joy of walking in the dry-leaf piles of a Norwich winter when the final line of a poem I’d been working at for ages simply slipped into my mind, so subtly and perfectly that I cheered quietly to myself.

That level of fun, freedom and tangibility with words is something I’d love to re-embrace again. So what better way to start than by exploring my home city with a wordsmith I’ve admired for years?

Capturing London in verse

Inua Ellams has an unabashed love for London. In a hidden corner of the Southbank Centre, he asks me and two other writers to explain our poetic backgrounds before launching into his favoured topics: identity, deconstruction, the ever-changing urban landscape and how it ties into his place within a city.

Our challenge for the day is to ‘capture London in verse’ (an experience orchestrated through a creative tour company called SideStory), achieved by using the environment around us. Our destinations change throughout the morning: Southbank to the National Portrait Gallery, Foyles Bookshop to the Poetry Cafe, and finally to an unobtrusive city pub.

Each place has resonance for Inua, and in just three hours it feels like he’s guiding us around his literary map of London.

As we move from building to building, down stairs, through tunnels and across the Thames, Inua simultaneously sets us a series of time-sensitive writing tasks. He requests observations of sensory experience – three moments each involving sight, smell, sound, taste, and texture – and suddenly my senses are on high alert.

The sloping backstreet we walk along is suddenly deafened by an onslaught of detail, from scents emanating through open cafe doors to the constant criss-cross of bodies passing us, each person cloaked in creative information.

I scribble as I walk, all sloppy handwriting and fevered fingers processing what my mind is picking up on.

When we reach the second floor of the Portrait Gallery, Inua grabs a stack of folding chairs and carries them through rooms of oil painted portraits before stopping in front of an austere looking face.

“Alexander Pope was awesome,” he says, taking a seat. “I can see him in rap battles… he took the piss out of everyone – but in verse.”

We sit quietly for a moment, weaving our recent observations into a short piece of prose before moving onward to a new location, and another writing challenge.

Finding direction through our writing

In Foyles bookshop we sit at high stools and write about shadows and light; outside on the street again, we write about well-known locations imbued with memories.

When we eventually reach an anonymous pub, Inua hands out copies of his own poem for us to read. We’re looking at his use of structure before attempting to emulate it with our own words for our final challenge. I find myself completely absorbed in the blank page in front of me, pen skating across the paper’s surface while I write about a memorable place in London.

In this barely thought-out poem, I am directing a hypothetical reader towards Trafalgar Square: towards the location of this year’s women’s march where my blood ran quick and strong, energised by the voices of thousands and their inherently positive beliefs.

I realise how much importance that event still holds for me: that it actually holds me up at times and makes me ever more determined.

Feeling out London’s light and space

“It’s fascinating and frightening… There are too many options of what to write about!”

Inua’s voice indicates the end of our final challenge, and the end of our time together. But in three hours, he’s reminded me what my main focus in writing needs to be. Knowing who you are as a writer is essential: knowing your nuances, your favoured language, and the style and structure that fits you best.

So how do you achieve that? Simple. You read, you write, and then read and write again.

I’ll always want to improve my writing, but it can be an actively positive process. It can draw from elements I know I love and feel inspired by.

Take poetry, for instance. Through its structure and the shape of its words on the page, it has an intention to guide and to connect – whether it’s about connecting people or politics or subject matter or cities.

In a recent interview, Inua said some beautiful words about London:

“I don’t really think there’s any one thing about this city – or any other city for that matter – that is a key to creativity and poetic thought. It is the entire experience. I view cities as organisms; a growing thing that is always both defined and undefined and changing from view to view, location to location, street to street, culture to culture, community to community. All of these things, I think, create a really healthy place for poetry to thrive.”

Even in the midst of a city filled with structures, barriers and cramped urban concrete, there’s a complete freedom to create something open and expansive and bright. It just depends on how you look  at it.

So play with space in your writing. Play with structure. Play with the light. See how minimal changes can cause the most effect. Read how other people structure their words, to see how your voice might fit within that narrative, or entirely contradict it.

And pay attention to the world around you. Because it’s down to personal interpretation, poetry doesn’t necessarily need to have form or identity. On the bus that afternoon, I listen to two boys freestyle-battling with each other while a woman chatters on her phone behind me – and it’s pure poetry:

“I change into cultures so quickly that I don’t know where I’m from…” — “Your soul mate knows your soul, even if it’s in another language…”

It’s inescapable. Poetry is everywhere.

Disclaimer: My poetic experience through London was kindly provided by Sidestory. They have a whole host of other unique experiences on offer – although they can’t guarantee you’ll feel quite as London-lyrical as I do afterwards!

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[nofomoartworld]

Column #28 - Popkalab Interview

Based between Rotterdam and Rio de Janeiro, experimental project POPKALAB is all about creating unique experiences through the mediums of smart clothing, unique design, interactive installations and tactile interfaces. Spearheaded by founder Ricardo Nascimento, the lab have recently been making waves with a series of wearable sound-based accessories and electronic-embedded sneakers - we caught up with Ricardo to find out more. 

The Creator's Project: Tell us a bit about POPKALAB – what's it all about, how did it first get started and what was your initial aim when setting the project up? Ricardo Nascimento: POPKALAB started as a platform to present my personal work. After some time, I started to receive requests from other artists and companies to develop interactive pieces, so I decided to migrate my personal portfolio and founded POPKALAB as a independent studio focused on the creation of experiences through smart clothing and interactive installations.

MAK Fashion Lab #01 - Shoes Sequenz from MAK Wien on Vimeo.

Walk us through the kinds of intelligent clothing prototypes POPKALAB works on. What are your thoughts on the ongoing relationship between fashion, technology and the body?

We develop pieces that expand our senses and use the body as a vehicle for making statements. We create clothes that make music, light up, react to cell phones and light to extend our body. For us, it's important to hide the technology as much as possible, until it becomes almost invisible – at first glance, the pieces look like ordinary pieces of cloth but when you start to interact with them through wearing them, something extraordinary happens. During the conception of the pieces, we try not to create "gadgets", but instead pieces that can have a poetical approach. We're more interested in making people dream, instead of necessarily making the wearer's life more efficient.  Fashion is a way of expression, and technology adds other possibilities for this expression to happen. 

We love the sound-based pieces like the Recording Shoes and the Orchestra Scarf you guys recently put together with the BLESSproject. Creating physical pieces that allow the wearer to tailor auditory experience as wearable fashion is a pretty impressive undertaking – what was the inspiration behind those designs? 

The idea behind the Orchestra Scarf was to create a bubble of sound around the body, as if it was a perfume. In the morning, you can choose which perfume you are going to wear – we wanted to do the same with the music, to allow people to be able to decide how they would like to sound. You can change the sound by wearing it in different ways. 

The Recording Shoes is a piece that plays with our perception; by playing the sound of steps when the person stops walking, we intended to create a sonic confusion. 

The last piece was the Melodised Hammock. The idea came from the design that BLESS made using pillows and robes – we wanted to turn the hammock into a instrument that can be played. The piece you've seen is the first prototype. We are now looking for opportunities to create another version, with more precise interaction.

http://ift.tt/2lm5U1l">Untangle me (2012) from http://ift.tt/2lbFv3G">ricardo O'nascimento on https://vimeo.com">Vimeo.

Interactivity is obviously a key concept for you guys too – POPKALAB also works on interactive video installations and walls. Out of those projects, which one/two was a particular favourite/standout and why? How does the art side of your work relate to the more style/fashion-based aspect of things?

Our goal is to create experiences. The sensation triggered by a piece is, for us, more important than the piece itself. Sometimes smart clothing is the best way to create a specific experience – sometimes it might only be a drawing. However, interactivity is a powerful way to engage people. 

A good example is the Head Bang Hero piece, which is a game where the interface is a long-haired wig, and you headbang to collect points – the tricky part is that you need to move your head a lot to get a good score, but by doing so you physically damage your neck. This behaviour raises interesting questions that go beyond pure entertainment, making us think about our relation with games. By using humour and fun, we can touch important aspects of contemporary life in a light, efficient way. 

I believe the art side and the fashion/style side are actually the same. If you think about a cloth as a wearable sculpture, you open your mind to other shapes and functions. 

POPKALAB was commissioned by Timberland last year – what was the deal there? (And if you could work with three other high-profile fashion brands, what would they be?)

Timberland wanted us to create an interactive piece by hacking one of their designs, so we created a shoe that posts pictures of your location on Twitter and Facebook while you walk. It got interesting feedback, especially from people concerned about privacy and geolocation. The shoes recently evolved into another product when we paired up with Opening Ceremony to embed electronics in their collab Adidas shoe design. The result was a piece titled 'Jump!' — sneakers that enable their wearer to leave both a physical and virtual path. One jump allows a post to Twitter, two jumps takes a Google Streetview photo and posts it to Facebook, while three jumps enable the wearer to pin their personal Google map.

I'm very happy that established brands are starting to invest on smart clothing on an experimental level. If I could choose three brands or designers to work with, it'd be Alexander McQueen for their poetical and extravagant design, Adidas for their experimental vision on technology and Philip Treacy – just because I love his hats. 

Outfits like yours are obviously at the forefront of the wearable tech field right now – what are your predictions for the medium over the next five, ten years or so? What kinds of developments will we see emerging?

In the past few years, the development of small and flexible electronics has opened up the possibility to create clothing that is both intelligent and fashionable. There are many "smart" pieces out there, but they lack in style. For example, the Google glass is a very interesting device in terms of functionality, but its design does not look so exciting. I believe that new smart clothes won't look like they're from outer space. At POPKALAB, we're looking for warm designs that show a seamless integration with the technology. 

In the future, I believe clothes will become more integrated with other electronics devices and that computers will be merged into everyday objects (including clothes) that will communicate with one another. This "Internet of things" is already happening, and will only increase in the near future. Smart clothes are improving the capability of communication with humans and the environment, as well as expanding our senses and modes of expression. However, despite all these exciting discoveries, we shouldn't just use technology because it's available; we need to create meaningful uses instead. 

Popkalap is based between both Rotterdam and Rio de Janeiro – as working environments, are there any creative differences between the two?

POPKALAB is based in Rotterdam because I'm based there. In the Netherlands there are many people doing amazing fashion tech pieces – there's a growing scene with names like Anouk Wipprecht, Maartje Dijskstra, Local Androids and Pauline Van Dogen, to name a few. The Rio office allows me to keep a connection with my country, although I work there way less than I'd like. Our clients are spread over the globe and we often work remotely, creating the concept together via video conference and developing the technology in Rotterdam. Working in Brazil is always a pleasure – people are more relaxed and open to new ideas – but the access to technology is more complicated due to the high price and delivery time. In Rotterdam, I have an amazing team of engineers and designers, which makes it easier to develop the custom electronics and 3D print used in our projects – those services are more accessible in Europe than in Brazil.

What kinds of projects has Popkalab got in store for 2014?

Next year will be very exciting. We are working on some projects, but unfortunately I can't tell much due to contracts. I can say that we are developing another interactive shoe related to music, and also working in collaboration with Brazilian fashion brand High- High to create a concept piece for their next collection. We're also planning to branch out into advertisement and promotion.

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