'Bright Phoebus' by Lal and Mike Waterson

Bright Phoebus is a classic folk-rock album, first released in 1972. It bombed, and has been almost impossible to obtain ever since (my copy is from ... mumble mumble, clears throat). Although it has never had a proper re-release, there was a CD issue at one point, based on what sounds like a very poor transfer from the vinyl. Here's hoping it gets a remastered digital upgrade.

Lal and Mike were siblings, and also sang (together with sister Norma and other relations and friends) as a group in The Watersons, who performed arrangements of traditonal music. Bright Phoebus was therefore a doubly unexpected release of all original material, coming as it did after a long hiatus from The Watersons. From the Wikipedia page for Lal:

Lal, Norma, and Mike Waterson were orphans and brought up by their grandmother who was of part gypsy descent. Always very close, they began singing together, with cousin John Harrison, in the 1950s, with Lal 'singing unexpected harmonies.' Having opened their own folk club in a pub in the fishing port of Hull where they grew up, by the mid 1960s they had developed their own unaccompanied style singing harmony style re-workings of traditional English songs. In 1968 they stopped touring and became geographically separate for the first time - Norma went to Montserrat, and Lal to Leeds where her husband George lived, while Mike stayed in Hull. Both Mike and Lal were writing songs and when Lal returned to Hull they began working together. When Martin Carthy heard Lal's songs he found them extraordinary. At this time Carthy was in the folk-rock band Steeleye Span and he told the bass player Ashley Hutchings about Lal and Mike's songs and together they arranged to have them recorded, not unaccompanied, but with a backing band that included Carthy, Hutchings and Richard Thompson. Bright Phoebus was released in 1972 and 'caused a quiet sensation'. Her songs sometimes echoed traditional material but also involved a variety of other influences - 'some veered towards jazz and ragtime, others like Winifer Odd had a quirky charm worthy of The Beatles, but with bleak lyrics added. Another favourite Fine Horseman, made use of unexpected chords and structures.' Lyrics were as important to her as the music. The writer she admired most was the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

That summary perhaps undersells the contribution of Mike Waterson to Bright Phoebus, although it would be fair to say that his songwriting isn't as extraordinary as Lal's. The opening Rubber Band, written by Mike, is something of an embarrassment: the sort of song that people who hate English folk rock imagine it sounds like (it reminds me of Steeleye Span's similarly execrable All Around My Hat). Mike's other contributions are more effective. He wrote the album's title track, and also the concluding verse of The Scarecrow, the spinechilling second song, which immediately stakes the album's claim to greatness. He also sings this song. His voice is quavering and full of character - Lal's is similarly 'impure'. Both have very pronounced NE England accents, even while singing (no transatlantic drawl here).



There is a fantastic cover of The Scarecrow by June Tabor, which I had with me in Venice when I wrote the first chapters of Five Wounds (and the song's scenario is adapted for a dream sequence late in the book).

Another standout is the penultimate track, Red Wine and Promises (written by Lal, sung by Norma in a guest appearance), which is one of the best songs about being drunk I've ever heard.



Here's a short radio documentary (in two parts) about the recording of the album:



Over twenty years after Bright Phoebus, Lal released a new collection of original songs with her son, Oliver Knight, Once in a Blue Moon.:



Sadly Lal died a few years ago, very suddenly; and Mike also died recently. Bright Phoebus not only represents a singular achievement as a piece of recorded music; but the history of its creators is also an example of how to live a dignified and meaningful life in the face of commercial failure. When they recorded the album, Lal was a housewife and Mike was a painter / joiner. Shortly after it bombed, they reformed The Watersons and went back to singing traditional songs. Neither of them gave up on music; and those who heard the album didn't give up on them either.

Chris Ware Quotation

CW: I don’t want them to be interesting lines or interesting drawings, because then my hand comes into it too much.

Q: Why is that a problem?

CW: Because I just think it’s harder to read, in the same way that I wouldn’t want to read Ernest Hemingway’s rough draft of one of his novels, I would want to read the typeset, clean version, because I don’t want to be aware of his handwriting or anything. Not that you couldn’t be, necessarily. It’s certainly interesting to see an author’s corrected proof — you can see his scratch-outs and things that are added in — but fundamentally the intention is to have it read smoothly. It’s the words that matter; it’s the story that matters, and fundamentally, I’m interested in the story ...

[From this interview]

'John Saturnall's Feast' by Lawrence Norfolk

A long time ago, I chaired a discussion on historical fiction featuring A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk. I'm a great admirer of Norfolk's work, and it's been a long time since his last book, so I am very excited about the publication of John Saturnall's Feast:

'There's this boy and he's an orphan and he becomes a chef in the 17th century. He falls in love with the wrong girl. The civil war happens so he loses everything but they can be together. Then when the Restoration happens, he gets everything back: he can be the greatest chef of the age and she can be lady of the manor and they have to decide what to do.' Carole said: 'Well what do they do?' I didn't know at that point but I knew I had to write the book to find out.

'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson

I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

The above quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, first published in 1886, is the epigraph for Pat Barker’s The Eye in the Door, a novel that features a protagonist experiencing fugue states. In The Eye in the Door, the theme of dissociation is strongly associated with that of surveillance: in other words, dissociation is a way to evade the surveillance of our own conscience, as indeed it is for Jekyll (see also: Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly).

Stevenson’s text is odder than its subsequent reworkings in popular culture might suggest. The first thing to note is that Hyde, who is described as both slighter and younger than Jekyll (the latter is common in dramatisations, but not the former), is rather unimpressive as an avatar of evil. He tramples a child underfoot in the opening chapter; and later he commits a murder without provocation; but otherwise his propensities are described in rather vague terms. Perhaps this was quite enough to create an overwhelming impression of evil in 1886, but it seems rather tame now. Of particular note – and again this distinguishes Stevenson’s tale from its later dramatisations – is the absence of any sexual element in Hyde's escapades. Indeed, there are almost no female characters at all, except in incidental roles (e.g. a servant who witnesses Hyde carrying out the murder from an attic window). This absence has lead some interpreters to see Hyde as an allegory of repressed homosexual desire (hence the lawyer Utterson’s suspicion that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll). As if in response to this, almost all subsequent dramatisations (including the very first stage production, in the 1880s) have added a heterosexual love interest for Jekyll, and in many cases, they also insist that Hyde’s evil nature expresses itself in sexual terms, usually by violence against female prostitutes (as in, for example, the 1990 television adaptation starring Michael Caine). This last point does take up an allusion in the original text, since Hyde rents a room in a squalid neighbourhood to facilitate unspecified depravities, an action that has no obvious explanation within the text (why would he need a separate room?), but makes immediate sense if one assumes his landlady is a madam.

Lending credence to both the homosexual and the violent heterosexual subtexts is the fact that all the important male characters in the story, including Jekyll, are middle-aged or elderly bachelors, who seem to spend most of their time in each other’s company (this circumstance is apparently not worthy of comment, either for Stevenson or his protagonists). The subsequent career of Jack the Ripper – who came to public attention in 1888, and has been associated with Hyde ever since – lent immediate credence to the second of these interpretations.

Both these sexual interpretations are of course characteristically psychoanalytic, in that they identify what the text does not say as its most revealing element. Stevenson himself rejected any sexual interpretation of Hyde’s proclivities.

Illustrated by ....

From The Paris Review interview with Robert Crumb:

INTERVIEWER

Genesis is obviously a graphic novel, but the cover is like a fifties comic-book cover.

CRUMB

It’s a Classics Illustrated! I had to argue with them to let me call it “illustrated.” They wanted to call it The Book of Genesis According to R. Crumb but I preferred “illustrated by.” I wanted a humbler position. It’s an illustration job, OK? Illustration has a bad name in modern culture because for decades artists who were “mere illustrators” were considered inferior to fine artists. Being an illustrator was looked down upon. It meant you were not really a creative person, you just had the technical skills that you were lending to someone else’s ideas. It’s all bullshit though—the fine-art world, the myth of the creative genius artist.

'Studies in Hysteria' by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer; 'The Unconcious' by Sigmund Freud

The Studies in Hysteria contains several of Freud's earliest case histories, and would be worth reading for that alone (their tentative and evolving format can be contrasted with the later case histories collected in the Penguin volume named after The Wolfman). The Studies are also the earliest attempt to theorise the 'talking cure' that Freud developed in collaboration with Joseph Breuer. This book is therefore the foundational text of psychoanalysis, although many of its ideas were later abandoned (for example, Freud is still using hypnosis for the earlier cases, and also ... massage!)

The collection of essays on The Unconscious includes later elaborations of some of the ideas introduced in the Studies. These essays are more concise and focused than the Studies; but they are also more abstract.

Freudian theory is often presumed to validate the concept of a fugue state: that is a split consciousness, which was a common symptom of hysteria. In fact, Freud's work opposed the prevailing view that Hysteria is a form of mental disintegration characterized by the tendency to to a permanent and complete split of the personality (this formulation is from Pierre Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals, 1894).

Even so, in the Studies, Freud and Breuer do repeat the then-accepted dictum that hypnosis is artificial hysteria (SiH, p. 15); and that, during a hysterical attack, a hypnoid consciousness has taken hold of the subject’s entire existence (SiH, p. 18). The therapeutic value of hypnosis was therefore due to a principle of resemblance between illness and cure. With the patient under hypnosis, the psychologist could communicate directly with her illness.

After 1900, as Freud developed both his theory of the unconscious and the therapeutic method of free association, he grew increasingly sceptical, not only of hypnosis, but of the whole concept of a double conscience. What we have within us, he argued, is not a second consciousness, but psychic acts that are devoid of consciousness (TU, p. 54). Thus the known cases of ‘double conscience’ (split consciousness) can most accurately be described as cases of a splitting of psychic activity into two groups, with the same consciousness alternating between the two sites (TU, p. 54). Similarly, in 'A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis' (1912), Freud again asserted that:

If philosophers find difficulties in accepting the existence of unconscious ideas, the existence of an unconscious consciousness seems to me even more objectionable. The cases described as splitting of consciousness ... might better be described as shifting of consciousness, - that function – or whatever it be – oscillating between the two psychical complexes which become conscious and unconscious in alternation.

Even in the Studies, while Breuer is confident that hypnoid states are the cause and condition of many, indeed most, of the major and complex hysterias, Freud is reluctant to concede full agency (that is, a truly independent existence) to unconscious ideas, which do not, therefore, 'belong' to an independent consciousness, but rather are removed from consciousness, as in this account of the influence of such ideas on Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (p. 168):

the love for her brother-in-law was present as a kind of foreign body in her consciousness, which had not entered into any relation with the rest of her ideational life. What presented itself, as regards this inclination, was the peculiar state of at once knowing and not knowing, that is, the state of the detached psychical group. This is all that is meant when we assert that this inclination was not ‘clearly conscious’ to her; it is not meant to indicate an inferior quality or a lesser degree of consciousness, but rather a detachment from any free associative traffic of thought with the ideational content.

The question of fugue states remains important in medicine today because of multiple personality disorder, a diagnosis that dates back to the heyday of hysteria, but has increased greatly in frequency in recent years, especially in America. In the Studies, Freud was exploring the idea that hysteria derives from repressed memories of sexual abuse. This is now thought to be an essential precondition for multiple personality disorder too. The later Freud seems to have abandoned (or at least ceased to emphasise) this presumed connection between sexual abuse and dissociation.

My new novel Reciprocity Failure features several actions carried out in a fugue state, although in the novel, these states are chemically-induced: that is, they are blackouts caused by alcohol and / or Stilnox / Ambien (which is in fact classified as a ‘hypnotic’ drug). In a blackout, the affected person performs actions of which they later retain no memory. In cases of extreme intoxication, there also may be considerable impairment of motor functions and perception, and observable personality changes. Oddly, there is very little theoretical discussion of such chemical blackouts (even though they are a well-attested phenomenon). In particular, the available discussion rarely relates blackouts to psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps this is because blackouts are treated as examples of short-term memory loss rather than dissociation; or perhaps it is because they have an identifiable physiological cause, and are always temporary. They therefore require no theoretical explanation.

Interestingly, the foundational literary account of multiple personality disorder - that is, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (on which, more soon) - also attributes the protagonist's transformation to chemical manipulation rather than hysterical dissociation.

Lovecraft on Mastermind

A Concise Explanation of Phenomenology

We are not separate from the world, ... our thoughts are not mirrors which reflect the world but a part of it, inextricable from the things we perceive.

'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' by Sigmund Freud

I have been reading a lot of Freud recently, in the new Penguin translations. The previous, so-called ‘standard edition’, created under the direction of James Strachey, was much concerned with the status of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, and Strachey sought to promote this status by coining several technical neologisms, where Freud had preferred to adapt idiomatic German terms. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in (arguably) Freud’s most popular book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which, even on the title page, is making a far-reaching argument: that the insights gained from treating neurotic and hysteric patients could be applied to a general theory of mind. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is also famous for introducing us to the idea of the Freudian slip, for which Strachey coined the ugly word 'parapraxis'.

A parapraxis is a meaningful mistake, through which we reveal something unintentionally. In it, we carry out an unconscious intention, which manifests itself as [a] disturbance to other, intentional actions (p. 183); the consequence (in, for example, the variant of this process involving a memory lapse, which affects a neutral thought, but one that is linked symbolically to a repressed idea) is that my act of volition failed to find its target, and I unintentionally forgot one idea while I intentionally meant to forget the other (p. 8).

The word Freud coins in German for this double or divided action is Fehlleistung, which, as Paul Keegan points out in his introduction, simultaneously suggests achievement or accomplishment (Leistung) and failure, errance (fehl-) (p. xxxviii). Keegan goes on to quote Bruno Bettelheim on the semantic connotations of this compound word:

When we think of a mistake we feel that something has gone wrong, and when we refer to an accomplishment we approve of it. In Fehlleistung, the two responses become somehow merged: we both approve and disapprove. Fehlleistung is much more than an abstract concept: it’s a term that gives German readers an immediate, intuitive feeling of admiration for the cleverness and ingenuity of the unconscious processes, without the reader’s losing sight of the fact that the end result of those processes is a mistake. For example, when we make an error in talking we frequently feel that what is said is right, though we also somehow know it is wrong. When we forget an appointment, we know that forgetting it was an error, but also feel that somehow we probably wanted to avoid keeping the appointment. Perhaps the best rendering of Fehlleistung would be ‘faulty achievement’. [Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (London, 1983), pp. 85ff.]

Elsewhere, I have seen 'faulty achievement’ rendered as ‘mischievement’, which fortuitously suggests ‘mischief’ as well as ‘mistake’. The only problem in the new Penguin edition is that the translator, Andrea Bell, having excluded the option of using the word 'parapraxis', has made it difficult to determine when Freud is using Fehlleistung, and when he is using some other construction.

I am reading Freud as research for my novel, Reciprocity Failure, which is concerned (among other things) with two modernist theories of consciousness (I know, I know, it sounds like a bestseller already). The first  is that of phenomenology, which identifies the essential aspects of consciousness as ‘intentionality’ (consciousness is always directed towards something, and is therefore always ‘full of’ something) and ‘givenness’ (we should take seriously how things present themselves directly to consciousness: that is, we should take appearance seriously); the second is that of psychoanalysis, which, famously, posits the existence of an unconscious, to which we do not have direct access. Phenomenology is very much in the Cartesian tradition (as is existentialism, to which it is closely related); and for Descartes, consciousness is self-evidently transparent to itself, and is an independent realm of being. Freud offers us a radical critique of this model of the self, even if Freud’s theory of perception is oddly indebted to Descartes (for example, in the premise that perception happens in the mind).

Keegan’s excellent introductory essay to the Penguin edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is both a consummate exercise in epigrammatic style (e.g. The this-world of the parapraxis offers only fugitive scenarios of the possible, and Everyday Life is a host of walk-ons: here comes everybody [p. xxiii]) and an attempt to restore Freud’s text to its immediate historical context in turn of the century bourgeois Vienna (in the process implicitly denying the text’s claims to universality). Thus Keegan points out that the public settings of Freud’s anecdotes are train carriages, health spas, doctors’ waiting rooms, and parlours. However, since I am interested in Freud as a modernist, I take him at his own estimation, not as a product of a particular historical moment, but as the creator of a general model of consciousness.

Freud's is a modernist theory, but it is also, in a sense, the origin of the postmodern strategies of deconstruction, whose methods are certainly derived from those of psychoanalysis. For example, it was Freud who infamously determined that whenever a patient says one thing, this may be taken by the analyst to mean the exact opposite. So one obvious interpretive move for texts written by Freud is to hoist them on their own petard and deconstruct them.

With this in mind, I am particularly interested in the question of agency in Freud. Where is agency located in the split intention of a Freudian slip, or, to put this differently, how is it possible to make a mistake deliberately? On p. 139 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud concludes that A structure of multiple stratified agencies can be seen as the architectonic principle of the mental apparatus [emphasis in the original], alluding to the unconscious, but this merely defers the need for an explanation. If there is a split between the conscious and unconscious, who mediates between the two, and determines what belongs to the territory of each? Someone must be doing it, and that someone must of necessity have access to both realms.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the question of who commits the slip is obfuscated or answered with circumlocutions. For example, on p. 212, writing about substitutions when reading a text aloud, Freud observes that Co-operation on the part of the verbal material alone both facilitates and limits determination of the mistake: here, therefore, agency lies partly in the text that the slipper misreads or mispronounces, which thereby 'assists' his hidden intention. But, cooperation with who?

Elsewhere, Freud refers to a mysterious 'censor', who is not, I think, identical with either the unconscious or the superego. Who is the censor? Who is censoring? Freud's answer might be: The question is a category error. The censor is not a person - not a 'someone' who wields agency.

So Freud doesn’t dispose of agency; he displaces it, or perhaps misplaces it, as in the Freudian slip itself.

Forthcoming Posts

I'll shortly begin a series of posts on works I've been reading recently. I aim to post one or two such entries a week over the coming months.

Video from Azoth Books

Here's a video from the Taiwanese publisher of Five Wounds, Azoth Books:

I have no idea whatsoever what the interviewee is saying, but I'm sure it's very intelligent!

Re: previous Five Wounds videos in English, here's an interview I did for The Wheeler Centre.

And here's some other introductory videos and a trailer.

Chinese Edition of Five Wounds

A Chinese edition of Five Wounds was recently released in Taiwan by Azoth Books. It looks amazing (there are several interior views of page layouts at this local book site). 

 

 

There are more pix at Dan's Blog.

Five Wounds: Review at 'Spike Magazine'

A belated mention for a review of Five Wounds by Declan Tan for Spike Magazine, for whom I also wrote a short piece on the design of the book a while ago. Here's an extract from the review:

Not every book looks and feels like an artefact when you pick it up. Oftentimes it is just words printed across cheap paper, the literal form of it separated from its content, cased in a merely functional cover with some gluey binding. But with Five Wounds, an “illuminated novel”, the very object itself is part of its mythology and there is a sense of something big, something heavy within it, if you have the time.

One false move, and I shoot you

None more existential clip from Jean-Pierre Melville's great film about the French Resistance, Army of Shadows:

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween from Dan Hallett (via Dan's blog)

Inspirations: Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju

Below is an edited version of the infamous scene from Georges Franju's poetic horror film Eyes Without a Face (1960), in which plastic surgeon Doctor Genessier removes a woman's face to replace that of his disfigured daughter. You don't actually see that much, and the special effects are not convincing today, but nonetheless not recommended for the squeamish. 

The cover of the Criterion DVD release of this film (left) is a typical example of the inspired approach to design used by this company, who always pay careful attention to the packaging and presentation of their releases. The film is an obvious reference for the character of Cuckoo in Five Wounds, although in fact I did not see it until after I had conceived of the character. My favourite scene in Eyes Without a Face is not the one excerpted in the clip above, but rather the subsequent montage that shows the transplanted face rotting as the recipient rejects the skin graft (which is also apropos to the themes of Five Wounds, but to the character of Crow rather than that of Cuckoo). Unfortunately I couldn't find that clip online. Bonus inspiration points for the fact that a character is eaten by dogs in the film's finale.

Interview with Zoe Sadokierski

A nice interview with Zoe (the designer of Five Wounds) about her work on two recent short-story anthologies has been posted at Allen & Unwin's Tumblr. Here's an excerpt:

The initial direction was clear in terms of what kind of mood needed to be communicated, but initially we were going to use another illustrator whose work was much more linear in style. It was a collaborative process to get to the rich, layered illustrations these covers ended up with. Designers call this the ‘rebriefing’ process; over the course of a project, you need to keep re-looking at the brief and reassessing how to keep all parties (publishing, marketing, sales, the authors) happy. Sometimes this means stopping, reflecting, and changing tack.

Venice, 2001; Cambridge, 2001; Sydney, 2009

Terry Gilliam explains his animation techniques

Fantastic archival footage of Gilliam.

Interview with Art Spiegelman

Style is a capitalist invention. It’s a trademark. It’s very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn’t my first concern. I got restless…

[Found at Austin Kleon's Tumblr.]

Sydney, 2009; Sydney, 2009

Sydney, 2008; Sydney, 2008

Five Wounds: Review at 'The Spectator Book Blog'

There is a nice review of Five Wounds over at The Spectator Book Blog, by Isabel Sutton, which describes the book as an 'engrossing and original fantasy'. Here's an extract:

To my amazement, I began to lose my scepticism and turn the pages with a genuine care for the characters’ fates. I squirmed at the gruesome deaths and held my breath as the hero and heroine made their getaway; by the end I was greedy to know what happens, fully absorbed in the throes of the story. My progress was checked, however, when the ending arrived. There wasn’t one pat conclusion, but two. In a final act of literary guile, the book pushes you back to consider how – as well as what – you are reading.

Dan's Blog

Meanwhile, over at Dan's blog, he has been discussing the influences on his illustrations for Five Wounds, thus: Piranesi, Blake, Hogarth M. C. Escher, Chris Ware Francisco Goya, Umberto Eco

Inspirations: The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers

I hate purity
I hate goodness
I don't want virtue to exist anywhere
I want everyone corrupt.