Sinister: Can you hear this / Or should I / Turn it up?

[P F]

I tell you what. Look up John Hughes in Thomson's
Biographical Dictionary Of Film. It's not
*outstanding*, no, it's not even that good - but DT is
a hero to one or two of us for his ability to be so
regularly, briefly, casually interesting, maybe right,
about things he doesn't even care about.

I have just heard the Go-Betweens compared to Dire
Straits.


THE OCEAN

Julie - never mind Sylvia, Who Is Julie? Her posts
remind me of the first line of Strindberg's, um,
Seminal, Live play of, oh, 1888:

- Miss Julie's crazy tonight!

She asked why the DDR wasn't featuring in her life!

It's finished, Julie. Gone with history's Southerly
winds. Kaput, as they say in Monaco.


JUST LIKE THE SNOW

Youn said

>> She's probably working on a story called "Chocolate
Snow".

Oh. So is Ally96, in his spare time at the golf club.
No, not really. He just plays golf. With a golf club.

Can you believe that I added those 'greater than'
signs myself?


THREE STEP

>>> I don't see the point of comparing the Magnetic
Fields to Belle and Sebastian.

Me either, as we say in Stockwell.

>>> Maybe I would if I read Alistair's piece, but I
don't want to see it.

Nor do I. Especially not after reading that silly,
ungracious demolition of it the other week.

>>> Before, he wrote a great piece on driving and
listening to music and how the kind of music he
brought for a road trip in the US was all wrong: it
wasn't BIG enough, or something like that.

OK, point taken. But have you read Edna Welthorpe's
piece on how THE REAL RAMONA finally made sense on the
freeways? *That*'s a good piece on music and driving.
You should post it to the list, Edna.

Edna?


I'VE BEEN LONELY

>>> Seymour Glass is my top literary crush.  (Even in
books they're taken!)

'Taken'? Taken by 'the Reaper', you mean?


HUEFFER SAYS THAT (2) JAMES BELAUDS BALZAC (p.308)

>>> Who is the person who said something like the
response to a work of art should be a work of art?

Many have said things like this. Some of them have
been 'artists'.

>>> What were his exact words?

Here's Ezra Pound in sunny June 1922:

The best criticism of any work, to my mind the only
criticism of any work of art that is of permanent or
even moderately durable value, comes from the creative
writer or artist who does the next job; and *not*, not
ever from the young gentlemen who make generalities
about the creator. Laforgue's Salomé is the real
criticism of Salammbo; Joyce and perhaps Henry James
are critics of Flaubert.

(Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot;
London: Faber, 1960, p.406.)


AUSTIN ALLEGRO

>>> And the correspondence between words and things in
the world is imperfect.

That depends on what kind of thing you think words
are, and what kind of work you think they do, and who
(human beings vs god, for instance) put them to that
work. In a sense my view on this is: there is no
extra-linguistic way of knowing about the shortcomings
of words in 'corresponding' to things; so to talk
about imperfect correspondence may be a wrong turn.

Believe it or not, I once tried to stick something on
this issue on the 'internet'. But the correspondence
between my intentions and the effects of the
electronic world was most imperfect.

>>> It would be useful to talk about something on its
own terms, but what are these terms?

I think that's a relevant question. 'Conversation' is
a helpful image again: a dialogue between the terms
that we take an object to provide, and the terms we
(unavoidably) bring to it. We can try, maybe, to keep
the conversation polite and respectful, and hope that
the two sets of terms will learn from each other;
although in some cases (avant-garde art; political
criticism) that may not be the point.

Many folk could help us out here. What about
Papercuts' hero Roland Barthes?


COFFEE IN DONCASTER

>>> And what are non-artists to do?

I seem to recall that Henri Bergson once said:

'If reality could immediately reach our senses and our
consciousness, if we could come into direct contact
with things and with each other, probably art would be
useless, or rather we should all be artists...'

(Actually this is from the canonical essay 'Laughter',
from around 1899.)


THAT GIRL? SHE COUNTS THE HOURS

>>> On the other hand, Richard Dalloway could not say
those words when he gave Mrs. Dalloway flowers. Doing
things with words.

Did he do them with flowers, either? Words might have
helped. I think that we're meant to be feel BOTH moved
by what he manages, ineptly, to 'say', AND saddened by
the failure quite to 'say' it. VW was, I think,
interested in the imperfections and ambiguities of
these matters. I seem to recall that Michael
Cunningham's The Hours (1998), a book that I like
perhaps even more than Mrs D itself, (unsurprisingly)
replays this incident somehow or other.


CRITICAL (YOU'RE SO)

>>> Sometimes criticism seems top-heavy. 

Anthony Powell: 'Books do furnish a room'.


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