'Available' by The National

From their album Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers

'Like a Rolling Stone' by Bob Dylan

In 1977, Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese were inseparable. 'I had always been a film buff, and [Scorsese] was a music buff', Robertson recalls. 'When I moved in into the house I brought these huge studio speakers into the living room, and on the other side of the house he turned a bedroom into a screening room. The screen was a whole bedroom wall'. The two men lived in a nocturnal world of parties and cocaine binges, editing The Last Waltz as other priorities allowed, which may explain why the film wasn’t ready for release until early 1978.

On 26 November 1976, the day after The Last Waltz concert took place, the Sex Pistols released their debut single, Anarchy In The UK. In January 1978, the group played their last disastrous gig at San Francisco’s Winterland – the same venue that had hosted The Last Waltz just over a year before. Thus the film’s period of gestation coincided precisely with the rise and fall of the first wave of British punk. Robertson and Scorsese, holed up in their air-conditioned Hollywood bachelor pad, and deprived of all sensory input except an endless succession of old films and albums on looped playback, were probably unaware of this, but the Pistols appropriated and inverted the same ‘end-of-an-era’ rhetoric that underpins The Last Waltz for their own purposes when they declared 1976 to be Year Zero in the history of popular music. It suited both camps to forget that Bob Dylan had already invented punk ten years earlier.

Witness the gig of 17 May 1966 at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, during which Dylan was backed by the future members of The Band. Nothing the Pistols ever recorded matches the savagery with which Dylan attacks the complacency of his own constituency that night; nor did Dylan ever again betray the kind of vulnerability that underlies the violence of his response to the – undoubtedly sincere – cry of ‘Judas!’, which leads inevitably into the final song, Like A Rolling Stone. The lyrics, viewed in the retrospective light of that agonised cry, sound like a pre-emptive series of counter-accusations, while the punchline of the chorus is equal parts identification and vilification; which is to say, it’s an attempt to marshal the creative potential of self-disgust, an attempt that’s only possible because it’s unclear to whom the question is addressed or even whether it’s sincere or rhetorical – unlike the unscripted exchange that opens the song, where the battle lines are very clearly drawn.

The Band weren’t The Band in 1966 of course. Not just because Levon Helm had temporarily absconded, unable to bear the heckling on the American leg of the tour, but also because Dylan doesn’t acknowledge their existence as a unit. In the footage included in Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, No Direction Home, Robertson is frequently visible, as inseparable from Dylan in 1966 as he was from Scorsese in 1977, the chosen confidante whose designated role is to echo Dylan’s self-image back at him. But Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson barely seem to exist, at least offstage. In concert it’s a different story, but still, the only voice heard from the stage is Dylan’s. Harmonies are strictly surplus to requirements in 1966, so Danko and Manuel literally have no voice, and Robertson isn’t yet so bold as to dare to mouth the words along.

Ten years after Dylan appeared at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, on 4 June 1976, the Sex Pistols played the same venue – although they only merited the ‘B’ stage, the so-called ‘Lesser Free Trade Hall’ upstairs. It was their first significant gig outside London, and was sparsely attended. They appeared again on 20 July, when word of mouth from the first show brought in a much larger audience, and when they performed Anarchy In The UK in public for the first time.

In 1966, the walkouts, boos and slow handclaps were in part arranged in advance, orchestrated by the commissars of the folk clubs, whose understanding of the significance of ‘their’ music was entirely in thrall to hard-left politics. According to the party line, Dylan had prostituted himself by turning his songs into commodities. In retrospect, the opposite argument seems more convincing: that preconceived audience expectations had fetishised Dylan, who was understandably unwilling to accept this state of affairs. How appropriate then that the most succinct dramatisation of this manufactured conflict took place in a venue called the Free Trade Hall.

In 1976, by contrast, the audience at the two Sex Pistols shows had no shared musical tradition and no idea of what to expect, but their response to a group that openly embraced the entrepreneurial spirit was one of ecstatic (self-)affirmation. Legend has it that everyone in the audience formed a band.

'Play it fucking loud!'

This is the only moment of unmediated communication in the Manchester version of Like A Rolling Stone, the only moment that leaves no room for misunderstanding or contradiction. It’s both an imperative and an affirmation. There’s no object, no subject, and therefore no gender: just a lightning bolt of energy that short-circuits all the normal paths of communication, erasing the distinction between monologue and dialogue; between question and answer.

'How does it feel?'

'Don't Do It' by The Band

They dove for this song. They grabbed it. They took it as a piece of rhythm, which is what white rock and roll bands have always done with rhythm and blues. They didn’t go for the soul of it – maybe because it wasn’t accessible to them, maybe because it wasn’t interesting to them. There was something in the rhythm that begged for more, that begged for speed, that begged for hardness, for harshness. It seems as if the entire performance is simply a dare: the various people in The Band daring each other to play harder than they’ve ever played before. And what’s most amazing is that they’re battering at each other, they’re throwing challenges at each other. That’s what’s going on in the rhythm. And then at the very end – I guess you could call it a guitar solo – Robbie Robertson simply cuts out on guitar. But he cuts out like somebody gunning a car out of town, as if he’s never going to look back at that place ever again. It’s an absolute escape, and it’s something to hear somebody leap right out of the song, the rest of The Band trying to keep up with him, almost as if to grab his legs as he makes it out the door – and failing. 

Greil Marcus

[The Band’s private studio in Malibu] had once been a high-class bordello. There were still mirrored walls in the bedrooms, and the corridors were lined with crushed-velvet wallpaper.

Barney Hoskyns

‘Cutthroat’.

It’s not the first audible, enunciated word in the film, since it’s preceded by a babble of production noise that concludes with the phrase ‘Same slate, still running’, reminding us that what we’re seeing is an artefact, whose production is dependent on the cooperation of a group of invisible artisans. But 'Cutthroat' is the first word that’s clearly directed at us, the audience, and the first spoken by a protagonist. An odd opening for a film intended as a monument to the history of a community.

‘Okay Rick. What’s the game?’

The speaker is off-camera, but the voice is clearly recognisable as that of director Martin Scorsese. When this scene was shot, in early 1977, Scorsese had already made a number of cameo appearances in his own films – for example, as a brothel client in 1972’s Boxcar Bertha – but most viewers would know the voice from a scene in the recently-released Taxi Driver, in which Scorsese delivers a monologue in the role of a jealous passenger spying on his wife from the back of Travis Bickle’s cab. Travis watches him via the rear-view mirror, without turning around or responding directly, so it’s a peculiar kind of monologue; that is, it’s a monologue that aspires to be a dialogue – whether with Travis or with the absent woman is unclear – but in any case it fails to hit its target. As such it anticipates the film’s most famous scene, in which Travis repetitively challenges his own dumb, uncomprehending reflection.

‘Cutthroat’.

Rick Danko, bass player and one of the three vocalists in The Band, answers Scorsese’s current (and seemingly innocuous) question. Danko is standing over a pool table with a racked set of balls.

‘What’s the object of it?’, Scorsese asks, again from off-screen.

‘The object is to keep your balls on the table and knock everybody else’s off’.

Danko breaks. He pots a number of balls with consecutive shots, as other group members watch passively from the edge of the frame. Is anyone else even playing? The dry smack of the impacts bleeds over into the warmer noise of audience applause, introducing the next shot, which is of The Band walking back onstage to perform what will be their final encore in their final concert in their original line-up, a momentous occasion recorded for posterity by Scorsese in this film: The Last Waltz.

The song The Band launch into is Don’t Do It. On this occasion, Danko sings lead, although that’s not always the case. The members of The Band are comfortable with each other in this way. They swap instruments as well as vocals: Danko changes bass for violin; Levon Helm changes drums for bass; Richard Manuel changes keyboards for drums; Garth Hudson changes organ for saxophone. They swap groupies too. On their 1974 tour with Bob Dylan, roadies take Polaroids of the available women at each date: a rotating menu of options.

There are three vocalists in The Band, but guitarist Robbie Robertson – the only group member who only plays one instrument – isn’t one of them. Nonetheless, he appears to sing along enthusiastically to every song in The Last Waltz, although his contributions are inaudible. His silent mouthing is significant, however, because the subtext of the film is Robertson’s claim to ownership over The Band’s legacy and back catalogue as the group’s main credited songwriter. It’s Robertson’s decision to dissolve the community of The Band, which (in his opinion) can’t continue to exist without him – a claim subsequently contested by the other four members, who recommenced touring and recording in the 1980s. So this final onstage show of solidarity masks profound inner tensions, and Robertson’s claim to leadership is based upon the nihilistic premise that the man in charge is the one with the key to initiate the self-destruct sequence.

Don’t Do It.

Again, an odd way to start (in fact, to end) a celebration: with a denial rather than an affirmation, with a deluded plea from a narrator in a pitiable state. But Danko doesn’t sing the words like a defeated, bitter man. He sings like he’s the sexiest motherfucker on earth, and he’s crowing in triumph. Moreover, he skips half the words, as if he’s in a goddamn hurry to get to the end. Probably he is. After all, it’s after two in the morning, and The Band have been playing for hours by this point in the filming of The Last Waltz. But there’s also a sense in which the tone of the performance deliberately nullifies the sense of the words, which speak of enthrallment even as the omissions and the acceleration send a different message: one of barely-veiled contempt for the addressee, who is revealed as the victim of an elaborate joke. She’s not a person. She’s a pretext for men to tell each other stories about what it means to be a man.

This, then, is the ‘official’ reading of the song in the film: In The Band’s world, no man is ever helpless before a woman. In The Band’s world it’s always the woman who says, 'My biggest mistake was loving you too much'. In The Band’s world, male sexuality is empowered by male solidarity.

I don’t live in The Band’s world.

Dancing

Denis Lavant dances, in:

Mauvais Sang by Leos Carax:




Beau Travail by Claire Denis:

Stream of Consciousness

Stream-of-consciousness is closely associated with literary modernism. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, et al experimented with this technique under the influence of contemporary philosophical attempts to define the nature of consciousness – it was William James who first referred to it as a ‘stream’ - for example, in the fields of phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

I rediscovered stream-of-consciousness recently in the work of Jean Rhys, whose short novels of the 20s and 30s are all marked by their profound exploration of the narrator’s sensibility via this technique. Here is a sample from Good Morning, Midnight (1939):

Now the room springs out at me, laughing, triumphant. .... Here we are. Nothing to stop us. Four walls, a roof, a bed, a bidet, a spotlight that goes on first over the bidet and then over the bed – nothing to stop us. Anything you like; anything you like. ... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us. ... A difficult moment when you are out of practice – a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary. 

Stream-of-consciousness has fallen out of favour recently, like many of the literary techniques associated with high modernism. It has largely been replaced by ‘limited third person narration’: that is, writing nominally from a third-person perspective, but in fact following the experiences and consciousness of a protagonist fairly closely. This technique allows writers the intimacy of a first-person perspective, while eliminating the dangerous idiosyncracies that come with direct immersion in the narrator's thoughts. Direct stream-of-consciousness is now used only to represent altered or damaged states of consciousness: that is, intoxication or madness. (Rhys’ protagonists are often on the verge of either intoxication or madness, or both.)

I am writing a novel about modernism and consciousness, but I never use stream-of-consciousness. It didn’t even occur to me until after I read Rhys. Why? Because Reciprocity Failure is more concerned with intersubjectivity, and so its key passages are either dramatic monologues (that is, written as if spoken aloud, as quasi-soliloquies) or dialogue exchanges: direct attempts at communication. In this context, stream-of-consciousness, as traditionally practiced, is a failure to communicate, a form of solipsism.

IBDS 2013 Conference

From the website for the 2013 conference of the IBDS (International Bande Dessinée Society), which is being held at the University of Glasgow from 24-28 June, and features appearances by Grant Morrison and many other UK comics luminaries:

Comics have a long tradition in Scotland and her neighbours. Many argue that the Northern Looking  Glass (1826), which was created in Glasgow, is the world’s first modern comic, that Scottish publisher DC Thomson’s The Dandy (1937 – present) is the world’s longest running comic, although it was with the English character Ally Sloper that we saw the world’s first comics superstar. The place of comics in Scotland will be celebrated by an exhibition in the Hunterian in 2015 showcasing the Glasgow-based Northern Looking Glass, as well as comics from DC Thomson in Dundee. In anticipation of this the Joint International Comics and Bande Dessinée Society conference in 2013 will explore the origins of the medium, and has adopted the guiding themes of The National Origins of Comics, Scottish Comics, and comics and national identity. However, the conference, like the exhibition, will also focus on much broader questions relating to text/image history and the cultural status of comics. It will examine the emergence of international comics traditions, exploring world traditions, and, for IBDS, specifically French-language ones. The conference organisers also invite papers and suggestions for panels on the international origins of comics, comics and identity, crossborder influences, and digital comics as a potential transnational “re-birth” for the medium and the industry. 

I am giving a paper on the influence of comics on Five Wounds on Tuesday afternoon as part of the programme.

Hand Lettering

Peter Bagge interviewed at The Comics Journal:

I very much followed Crumb’s example with Weirdo, where he made the letters pages part of the art. It was very careful designed and carefully edited to be as entertaining as possible. He lettered the letters pages by hand, and so I did the same thing. But once I started doing Neat Stuff and then Hate then I had to do type-set, because doing that by hand was insane. .... And then Dan Clowes used to do that with Eightball. I would say that along with a lot of what Robert Crumb did, I think nobody made a better package using the comic book format than Clowes. He very carefully pieced it together, he would even hand-letter the indicia, and hand-letter and hand-design back-issues ads. .... So what would normally be all be filler and house ads, he did all by hand and made a piece of artwork out of it. And like his hand-lettered his letters sections, they always looked beautiful. And they ware entertaining.

There is a persistent prejudice against typesetting in the comics world: an assumption that hand-lettering is always more expressive. I don't share this prejudice.

Article in 'Visual Communication'

The latest issue of the journal Visual Communication (May 2013) has an article I wrote on the design of Five Wounds. Best accessed via a university library subscription.

Vertigo

The Novelist and the Storyteller

The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others.

From The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin 

Benjamin was distinguishing the novelist from the 'storyteller', by which he meant someone participating in an oral culture: that is, someone linked to their audience by direct physical contact, for whom storytelling is a bodily performance. I think that the growth of online culture has, ironically (given that all online communication is, by definition, mediated), taken us back to the age of the storyteller. It is impossible to flourish as a new writer now without communicating regularly and closely with one's audience: that is, without performing the role of author in public.

Site Maintenance

I am in the process of changing servers, so my website (jonathanwalkervenice.com, and various subdomains) is likely to experience significant downtime over the next couple of weeks. Links from blog entries to the site will suffer accordingly.

The site should be back to normal before Christmas.

EDIT: Everything seems to be working fine as of 18 December.

Most Print Books are Ugly

In the endless debate over e-books, one of the principal reasons for defending the older, analogue model of publishing has been the fetishisation of the book as an object (I'm not using 'fetishisation' perjoratively here: I'm a fan of fetishisation). But the fact is that the vast majority of printed books are not desirable objects. The vast majority of printed books are incredibly ugly. They're printed on cheap paper, which begins to yellow very quickly; they're poorly bound, and begin to fall apart very quickly; they're poorly typeset, with inadequate margins; and they're shoddily packaged, with covers that date very quickly.

I do not conclude from this that e-books are better than traditional paperbacks: no design whatsoever is not superior to poor design. My conclusions are instead similar to those of Richard Nash, former Head of Soft Skull Press, interviewed at The Boston Review:

I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years. 

Interviewer: Why? 

When I started at Soft Skull in 2001 we were printing on 55-pound paper. By 2005, we were typically printing on 50-pound paper. By 2008, half our books were on 45-pound groundwood. And that’s because our print runs were going down. And even with publishers whose print runs weren’t going down, they were trying to save money. Because when the book’s primary purpose was not to be an object, but rather to be a mass-produced item for sale in big-box retail, then there’s going to be downward pressure on costs. And so what we have witnessed over the last 50 years is the progressive shittification of the book as an object—a process that is not external to publishing as it was practiced over the last 100 years, but has in fact been at its fore. 

If you’ve got a manufacturing supply chain, then the dictates of manufacturing are going to be the ones that drive the business. And there’s certainly going to be some ad hoc occasional efforts not to do that: certain independent publishers will try to focus on quality, and certain individual books from other publishers might be tarted up for one reason or another, for marketing purposes. But those are the exceptions. Basically, when you’ve got an industry that is pushing out $25 billion worth of physical products into a supply chain, the vast majority of businesses are going to try to cut costs and increase revenues. And the simplest way to cut costs is going to be on the production side. So if the core of the business is no longer a supply chain, but rather the orchestration of writing and reading communities, the book is freed of its obligation to be the sole means for the broad mass dissemination of the word, and instead become a thing where the intrinsic qualities of the book itself can be explored. 

I believe in the importance of book design to the reading experience. In its current form, the e-book entirely nullifies the existence of design, and wiping out centuries of accumulated wisdom on how to improve the reading experience at a stroke hardly seems worthy of celebration. But equally I feel little nostalgia for the cheap, smelly, decaying paperback editions I grew up with.

I think the role of printed books in the future will be similar to the role of vinyl in the current music industry. And if that means better designed and better produced books, but in much smaller quantities, and at a higher price, well, so be it.

For my next book, I anticipate preparing a 'generic' electronic edition, which adapts the contents to the limitations of e-book format (since it's foolish to pretend that e-books don't exist); and a printed version with a more elaborate and nuanced design. The word count will be exactly the same, but the presentation will be quite different. Such distinctions seem a necessary evil, since failing to accomodate the electronic version to the limitations of the software in e-readers could have unforeseen consequences, and (in a book in which design is an important element) could in fact render parts of the work utterly incomprehensible if said design elements are simply automatically 'stripped' by the e-reader. Authors have to intervene in this process, not leave it to the software designers.

Or maybe my sense of the limitations of e-readers is inaccurate (I don't own one). Has anyone read, for example, House of Leaves on an e-reader? What kind of experience was it?

[N.B. I found the Nash interview here.]

Bagpuss and Commodity Fetishism

The collector … makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value.

Walter Benjamin

What is it that animates Bagpuss and his friends? Love.

Emily's shop doesn't sell anything, but only displays valueless objects lost by others. These lost objects include, implcitly, Bagpuss and his friends, who live in the shop window, and who, in each episode, interpret and repair a new object that Emily finds and brings to the shop:

The toys would discuss what the new object was; someone (usually Madeleine) would tell a story related to the object (shown in an animated thought bubble over Bagpuss's head), often with a song, ... and then the mice, singing in high-pitched squeaky harmony as they worked, would mend the broken object. The newly mended thing would then be put in the shop window, so that whoever had lost it would see it as they went past, and could come in and claim it.

Bagpuss is about the recovery of meaning through love. Love is a kind of fetishisation, but it acts as the antidote to commodity fetishisation. 

(I see I am not the first to give Bagpuss a quasi-Marxist reading. In mulling over this reading, I also had a go at connecting the moment of Bagpuss waking up to Benjamin's image of awakening into revolutionary consciousness from the nightmare of history, but I couldn't quite make that idea work.)

'Casanova' by Federico Fellini

Heath Ledger is too pretty for the title role in Lasse Halstrom's recent film about Casanova. The Venetian lover has no pathos if he’s played as a pretty boy. Fellini's similarly eponymous 1976 film stars Donald Sutherland, an unlikely (and therefore more interesting) choice, with his prominent eyes and lugubrious face, features which are further exaggerated by an artificially shaved hairline. His head looks like an egg, from which two additional half-eggs protrude in the form of his eyes. It’s a film about creative exhaustion (sex being Casanova’s arena of aesthetic activity), which unfortunately succumbs to its protagonist’s state of mind.

In the most striking scene, Casanova makes love to his ideal partner: a clockwork automaton, played by Leda Lojodice (a.k.a. Adele Angela Lojodice), who I assume was a dancer, since her movements are precisely suggestive of mechanism, but in a graceful, liquid way: a woman pretending to be a doll pretending to be a woman. (This version is in Italian with no subtitles, but the dialogue isn't really important.)



The music and sound design (for the automaton's clockwork sounds) complement the actress's performance perfectly. It's an incredibly creepy scene about narcissism and objectification, which is obviously influenced by Hoffman's tale of the Sandman, with the doll here being a version of Olympia in that tale.

Compare and contrast Deckard's encounter with the renegade 'pleasure model' replicant Pris from Blade Runner:



HA HA HA HAA HAAAA.

'The Uncanny' by Sigmund Freud

Eyes in The Terminator and Blade Runner:

'Texi Driver' by Martin Scorsese (written by Paul Schrader)

THEN SUDDENLY, THERE IS A CHANGE.

I wrote an austere film and it was directed in an expressionistic way. I think that the two qualities work together. There is a tension in the film that is very interesting.

Paul Schrader

'Paris, Texas' by Wim Wenders

TRAVIS?

'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.