About Adam
Email Address: DrACRoberts@aol.co.uk
Website: http://adamroberts.com
Posts by Adam
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
On Pinter
I direct your attention to this engaging, thoughtful response to the news of Pinter’s death by my friend and colleague Dan Rebellato (a pretty notable contemporary playwright himself) on the Royal Holloway Creative Writing course blog. It meditates upon Dan’s own indebtedness to Pinter, the way his dialogue works (’Technically - and boringly - his language is fiercely performative. It’s not what people are saying it’s that they are saying it and what they are doing by saying it‘), his affinity with Python (I think the Python boys are often underappreciated as theatrical writers; their dialogue is often first class) and what he did when Dan accosted him on the street. It’s worth your time.
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Friday, January 02, 2009
Urine-coloured, pooch-screwing
I had read it before, but at speed; this Christmas, though, gave me the opportunity to read it again. And so I did. It made me think: why do I keep going back to Martin Amis? I suppose it is because I like the idea of Amis. I just can’t seem to get my actually-reading-Amis ducks in a row.
What am I talking about? Yellow Dog (2003) that’s what. Science Fictional (alt-historical) or at the least satiric-phantasmagorical, Yellow Dog is set in a 2003 in which Henry IX sits on the throne of England—his wife is in a coma and his 15-year-old daughter subject to leering, video tabloidesque intrusions into her bathtime frolics. Henry is one character in Amis’s tale; another is Clint Smoker, a hack from a sub-Sun rag called Morning Lark. Another character is the improbable film-star, novelist, rock-star, ideal husband Xan Meo who gets clonked on the bonce and undergoes a change of personality into an obnoxious spoiling-for-a-fight alpha male. Then there’s Joseph Andrews, an elderly Brit-gangster even less believable than those delineated by Guy Ritchie. Hard to imagine, I know, but there you go. Amis sets these different storylines running, but seems clueless as to how to bring them back together again: he ends up literally smashing them into one another—very crudely handled. There’s also an underpowered conspiracy plotline that’s supposed to link them all, but which fails to do so.
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Friday, December 12, 2008
May Your Days Be Merry And Bright
And here, at last, is your obligatory Valve Christmas post. Well, sort of. Earlier today, discussing Christmas songs with my daughter, I revealed I knew all the words to ‘White Christmas’. When pressed as to how I knew this (whether, for instance, I had specifically memorised the lyrics) I made the following, and in retrospect perhaps rather embarrassing, confession.
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Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Ho ho Hogarth
Not as Christmassy, actually, as that title might suggest, this is actually a post about a Hogarth sketch, ‘George Taylor Triumphing over Death’ (1750, or thereabouts). It is one of two Hogarth chalk-on-paper designs (the other is here) picturing this handsome eighteenth-century boxer and wrestler. It’s in the Tate, London, and this is what the gallery’s website has to say about it.
This drawing forms part of a design by Hogarth for a tombstone for the famous boxer and prize-fighter, George Taylor. Nick-named ‘Taylor the Barber’ because of his other profession, he became Champion of England in 1734. From the early 1730s Taylor was proprietor of the Tottenham Court Boxing Booth. He also ran an academy where gentlemen were taught the art of self-defence. Taylor, who clearly had a fine physique, may also have modelled at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy, where Hogarth himself taught.
And what a splendid, weird little image it is.
The implication must be that Taylor is so expert a wrestler that he has defeated death. Is that the Last Trump, emerging hornily from the clouds to bring in the end times? Nothing less, surely, would be required. But doesn’t that horn look a little like … a bone? And isn’t there something disconcertingly … sexual about George’s posture? His musculature is so pronounced, and drawn in such an angular, inorganic way, that it seems almost to detach from the flesh: there’s almost a parallel between the solid mass of pectoral muscle, there, and the solid swathe of modesty-preserving cloth about his loins. And his gestures are so angular and awkward (his head at such a dislocating angle, his arms like two branches of a swastika, the twist to his torso, the one leg straight the other tucked away like he’s playing Long John Silver on the stage) it’s as if his body is trapped in painful mimicry of the skeleton beneath. Does it look to you as if Taylor’s left leg almost extends behind him in skeletal form? Is that some kind of Mannerist visual echo?
Taylor’s knee is penetrating, breaking indeed, the ribcage of the skeleton beneath him. But the skeleton’s left femur, paralleling Taylor’s leg, occupies an almost lasciviously obvious phallic position. The ambiguity is enhanced, isn’t it, by the fact that this is only a sketch: the bare bones, we might say, of a picture. And this is to say nothing of the quasi-blasphemy of giving Christ’s job (conquering Death) to a bald-headed barber-wrestler, howsoever fine his physique.
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Thursday, December 04, 2008
Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks
Splendid, splendid: this is what you want from a history: viz., interminable lists of battles and meetings by people you’ve never heard of but whose names you find a constant delight, interspersed with theological debate and the occasional Sign and Wonder. Most of it, then, is like this:
While King Chilperic was still in residence at Nogent-sur-Marne, Egidius Bishop of Rheims arrived on an embassy, with the chief notables of Childebert’s court. A conference was arranged and they made plans to deprive King Guntram of his kingdom ... Lupus the Duke of Champagne had long been harassed and despoiled by those who were hostile to him, especially Ursio and Berthefried.[328-9]
It should be law: any booksellers selling a history book be required to ask ‘do you want Berthefrieds with that?’ The Cs alone are worth the price of admission: the son of Lothar I is called ‘Chramn’; the King of the Alamanni is ‘Chroc’ and Chilperic (a major player, is Chilperic, which is ... you know, great) has a daughter called Chroma. I shall never need to invent a SF or Fantasy name, ever again.
The signs and wonders sometimes live up to their name (snakes falling from the clouds, loaves of bread bleeding when broken etc) but more often than not Gregory relates things under the ‘signs and wonders’ heading that seem to me less than wonderful, and significant only of ordinary winter weather: ‘great signs and wonders ... floods devastated parts of Auvergne. The rain continued for twelve days ... in Bourges there was a hailstorm’ [295-6]; ‘signs and wonders ... that year the wine harvest was poor, water lay about everywhere’ [483].
But by far my favourite intervention is when Gregory stops his narrative in Book VII in order (chapter 41) to tell us about a giant. Understand, the whole of this (admittedly fairly short) chapter is given over to this. ‘One of the servants of Mummolos was brought to the King. He was a giant of a man, so immense ...’ Yes you’re excited. A genuine giant. You’re thinking, what, 40 or 50ft tall? You read on: ‘so immense that he was reckoned to be two or three feet bigger than the tallest man ever known. He was a carpenter by trade. He died soon afterwards.’ [425] So, to recap: Gregory stops his history to tell us about a man two foot taller than a Frenchman. Isn’t that splendid? ‘Never mind the battles and councils, look over here! A fairly tall person!’ Chramn it, I’m two foot taller than a Frenchman. Which leads me to believe that I ought to be in the history books.
This isn’t snark. What makes this so wonderful is the way Greg-de-Tours’ history begins, quite literally, at the beginning (’in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth in His own Christ’, 69) and rattles through Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, David, Christ (all this within 12 pages), then the Roman Imperium, the invasion of France by the Alamanni and King Clovis (in about another dozen) Thus the entire history of absolutely everything and everybody is covered in a couple-dozen pages, and the dynastic squabbles of four of the sons of Lothar I and the other goings-on of Greg’s own time fills the rest of this (in the penguin ed) 700 page tome. In other words, it is precisely the glorious mismatch between the global prospectus and the fantastically niggly, parochial, particularism of the actual history that is so winning.
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Friday, November 28, 2008
Tribute Band
Friends and I have been thinking of setting up an Adorno tribute band, to be called The Doornos. Signature track: ‘Come on Baby, Dialectic of Enlight my Fire’. Also on the playlist: ‘‘Riders on the Sturm und Drang’’, ‘(Horkheim) So Lonely I Could Cry’, ‘You Kant Always Get What You Want’, ‘(Frankfurt) School’s Out for Summer’, ‘Fromm Me to You’. ‘Polly Wanna Krakauer’ and, for the encore, ‘ I Just Wanna Be Your Teddy Bear’. Conceivably we might cover Boney M’s ‘Ma-ma-ma-ma-Marcuse’. Thank you, we’re here all week. Try the veal. Also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
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Saturday, November 15, 2008
Reviewing
I want to second Joe’s endorsement of Andrew Seal’s excellent Biographia Literaria blog: definitely worth your time. But more specifically I want to pick up on Seal’s recent post ‘Some Advice on Reviewing From John Leonard’. In the iterative down-the-rabbit-hole mode of blog links, this is to direct you to Seal’s link to Leonard’s review of Dale Peck’s collection of reviews (Seal calls the volume ‘execrable’) Hatchet Jobs. Leonard mislikes Peck’s ‘smashmouth’ approach to reviewing, picking fights, calling authors who are trying their best ‘the worst author of their generation’ and so on. Leonard wants more respect in reviewing, and Biographia Literaria agrees, quoting Leonard’s mild peroration:
First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom.
Seal: ‘I’m not sure what all of these mean, to be honest (horsemen on the roof?), but I understand the sentiment, and it is a corrective one, a valuable one, and an honest one.’ Is it, though?
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Saturday, November 08, 2008
Michael Crichton
So Michael Crichton died on November 4th. I find myself a little surprised by just how many of his (to be honest) workmanlike and often plodding novels I’ve read in my life: a lot. He was enormously successful, of course, despite being not a very good writer. I feel comfortable calling him ‘not a very good writer’ now that he’s dead. Doing so when he was alive was a more precarious business, as the following story makes plain. [I quote from this account in the Fordham Law Review]:
In 2006, New Republic columnist Michael Crowley authored a critical profile of author Michael Crichton. Shortly thereafter, Crowley noticed a strong resemblance between himself and the character “Mick Crowley” in Crichton’s latest novel, Next. In addition to having nearly identical names, both Crowleys are graduates of Yale University and political journalists in Washington, D.C. In the novel, Mick Crowley’s appearance is brief but notable. He is a pedophile on trial for sodomizing a two-year-old child and, Crichton writes, his “penis was small.” Crichton [had] apparently resorted to employing the small penis rule, a “sly trick” used in publishing to ward off defamation lawsuits. Assuming no man would come forward claiming to be a character with a small penis (or would invite such an inquiry), the scheming author simply depicts his target as less than fully endowed. The author then defames as he pleases and hopes his subject forgoes legal action due to the possible embarrassment of coming forward. Thus, the small penis rule is not really a rule, merely a tactic for discouraging litigation. In the end, Michael Crowley [was] disinclined to file suit. Although “grossed out,” Crowley says that he was “strangely flattered” by his “sliver of literary immortality.”
So, ladies, gentleman, if you learn nothing else today, at least take this to heart: the small penis rule is not really a rule. A precept to live by, we can all agree.
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Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Three Very Short Kurmanji Stories
They’re below the fold, each no more than 80 words long, and I think they’re lovely. But before we get to that, some context: on a whim I bought a copy of E B Soane’s Elementary Kurmanji Grammar (1919) from the Oxfam in High Wycombe for 59p. Kurmanji is a main Kurdish language; and this little orange-bound book is, according to its preface ‘intended primarily for the use of officers and others whose duties leads them to the southern districts of Kurdistan.’ The British military presence in Iraq, 1919—one year before the official establishment of the British Mandate of Mesopotamia—is one of those ghosts of history still very actively haunting the present. And what a weirdly vivid through-the-chinks portrait this book provides of the sort of world a British officer stepped into (or expected to step into) amongst the Kurds. By way of ‘common idiomatic phrases’ and verb tables Soane offers us not pens of aunts or postillions lightning-struck, but rather:
akuzhim it I will kill you.
(but) dabe bikuzhim it I shall (probably) kill you.diz le kewda hatin a khwarawa Thieves came down from the hills.
rutit akam I strip thee
rutim akai Thou strippest me
rutian akan They strip melai imda I strike
lai imda I struck him
laim ida He struck me
la’ian manda We struck him
laiman ianda They struck us
Of course it’s amongst other things a way of interpellating a whole country, a whole people, as violent and barbaric. In that respect it feels, oh I don’t know, rather modern; as a primer in the ways in which Western Europe continues ideologically to construct a notion of meso-oriental existence. Laiman ianda, indeed.
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Monday, October 27, 2008
Sentiment and irony
In his poem ‘The Definition of Love’, Bernard O’Donoghue suggests love is not what has previously been suggested (not sex, not wishing someone else’s welfare, notcetera), but is rather fingers touching fingers across a linen tablecloth. The last nine lines of the poem are given over to this little narrative:
A young curate of a parish in West Cork
Was told his mother was seriously ill
And he must come home to Boherbue
(In fact she was dead already; they had meant
To soften the blow). He drove recklessly
Through mid-Kerry and crashed to his death
In the beautiful valley of Glenflesk.
This was because he fantasised in vain
About touching her fingers one last time.
Nicely handled, this, I’d say: the use of plain language and the plain measure of blank verse, the vocabulary titivated by the expressive use of Irish place names; the way the syllabic count contracts (11, 10, 9; and then again 11, 10, 9) until the punctus is reached at ‘death’, whereafter the lines are all regularly decasyllabic. It is properly touching poetry. More, its the kind of dramatic irony (as in Greene’s Heart of the Matter) that is both surprisingly resonant and surprisingly rare in contemporary literature. Why should this be? I’ve been thinking about it, and I wonder if my first reaction—that it is too sentimental for modern tastes (although ‘sensibility’ is not a criterion of aesthetic dispraise, in my book)—hasn’t got it the wrong way about. What I mean is I wonder now whether the definition of sentimentality isn’t, as it is often taken to be, grounded in affective response; whether sentimentality isn’t more radically the iteration of a certain sort of dramatic irony.
I’m not sure about this. I think the idea would be something like: affect is affect; babies are cute; young love is young and lovely, kitties are ‘aww!’, but none of these things (or the representations thereof) are sentimental exactly. That articulation of sensibility in the fullest sense needs irony.
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Monday, October 20, 2008
Bleak Dorrit
Bleak Dorrit is, as you can see from that link, the title of a posting on the course blog for the Royal Holloway University of London MA in Victorian Literature and Culture on which I teach. Last week I wandered into a two hour seminar on Little Dorrit with a copy of Bleak House in my hand, just because, well sometimes I’m dozy like that. This year’s group happens to be a good one, and they saved my blushes with some on-the-ball discussion of a variety of aspects of the novel: anticlimax, financial and other hollownesses; flattened or empty characters, the representation of alienation. But, as I note in the blog post, I started to wonder whether both their and my praise of the novel carried a sort of latent assumption that its virtues put it on a par with Modernist novels rather than those loose, baggy, Victorian sentimental confections the academy finds it so easy to patronise. ‘Hey, hey, maybe Old Curiosity Shop is kinda gooey, but, but look here: Little Dorrit is practically a Modernist masterpiece of alienated and fragmented subjectivity! Just look at Mr F.’s aunt!’ I wonder whether the drift of our judgment, in other words, was predicated on a tacit belief that Modernist art is in some sense more worthwhile (more relevant, more sophisticated, whatever) than Victorian art. That’s not something I believe, actually. Indeed, last year the seminar on The Portrait of a Lady specifically discussed how we might respond to James’s novel if we were to take it not as a proto-Modernist text but instead precisely as a High Victorian boiling pot. What’s going on here? Is it that my bias takes the Victorian to be more lively, comedic and rounded; and reserves the hollowed, the alienated, the flattened affect for the Modern? Hard to justify that position. Or maybe my doziness goes deeper than I realised.
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Saturday, October 11, 2008
2008 Nobel Prize for Literature: Jean-Marie Le Clézio
So, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, and across the anglophone world there are joyful, rooftop-to-rooftop cheers of ‘who?’ and ‘why have I never heard of him?’ Speaking for myself, I was sufficiently ashamed of my ignorance to at least rootle around online a little, to see (for instance) which of Le Clézio’s many books might be worth picking up. Because, yes, I had never heard of him until I heard the news yesterday; and, yes, I’ve never read his books. The first thing I discovered was that despite promising-sounding titles like Le déluge (1966), L’extase matérielle (1967), Les géants (1973), Voyages de l’autre côté (1975), Mondo et autres histoires (1978) and Gens des nuages (1990), in fact Le Clézio has never written a science fiction novel. Imagine! Not even one. But, I’m not one to allow prejudice to get in my way, and I shall give him a go anyway.
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Saturday, October 04, 2008
McKendrick’s Fisheye
Here is a poem I currently have a crush on, from Jamie McKendrick’s Ink Stone. McKendrick is a poet I’ve only recently encountered (this collection came out five years ago: he’s published a newer collection since). He was born in Liverpool in 1955, says Faber’s cover-blurb; and he has published various things, and he has won the Forward Prize for poetry. Good. But ... he has no Wikipedia entry which means that, in a very real sense, he doesn’t exist. The poem is called ‘Fish Eye’:
Hours of nothing biting on the lugworm bait
the twins had shown me how to catch—then suddenly
this spiny monster gurnard face appeared
banging about on the floor of the rowboat
like a fist or a heart. Way too scared
of its hackled gills and crest of spikes
to unthread the hook and heave it back
we froze, and watched its will to live abate
while a fog like a tide of opal stole
over the oily surface of the eye
extinguishing an eerie Borealis.
Were the cells desiccating in the iris?
Or divulging the inky depths to this new hemisphere
of air too thin, too dry and bright to bear?
It’s the four lines 8-11 (from ‘we froze...’ to ‘...borealis’) that make the poem, I’d say: exquisite nape-hair-stirring poetry. Of course the slightly rocoso flourish of their effectiveness depends upon the way they are framed in a series of deliberately downtoned, plainer lines (plainer, although not without their own punchily vivid imagery: ‘banging about on the floor of the rowboat/like a fist or a heart’). What I mean is that the poem starts by positioning itself as a mundane piece of storytelling (’I went fishing with my grandchildren one day, and we caught a fish...’), human experience articulated in ordinary vocabulary weighted towards monosyllables (line 5, say), but then it orchestrates a shift in register ‘up’ (as it were) to capture the awe--if that’s not too pretentious a way of putting it--entailed in being a witness at a dying. In other words, the extravagently polysyllabic line 11 works in part because its situated amongst a clutch of deliberately less extravagent lines.
I’m a little in love with the whole collection, actually: there’s a carefully worked and very resonant pattern of recurring theme-work throughout, about eyes, and about ink (two necessary premises of the poet, we might think; and two things imagistically strangely close). This poem is about seeing, and the passing of sight, and about recording the sight in an inky medium (the inky depths). It is about the uncanny, and it achieves a neatly uncanny effect. Dying is a freaky business. I consider the eerie Borealis of my own consciousness. It won’t last forever, I suppose.
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Monday, September 29, 2008
Booker Prize shortlist
I don’t know how the judges feel, but I’ve now come to the end of my slog through the Booker longlists and shortlists, and I’m pooped. It’s a gruelling and rather depressing experience to trawl through so many books in a relatively short time: it irons out many of the specificities and the savourable qualities of the individual texts and leaves an impression in the mind that all contemporary fiction is more-or-less the same. That, in part, is because there is a samey quality to this year’s Booker Shortlist; or to be more specific it possesses a two-tone quality: half rather earnest Britain and Ireland a few decades ago, and half postcolonial eastern, far-eastern and far-south-eastern colour-splashes. Oh for a single science fiction work.
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Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Infinigon Jest
For obvious reasons I’ve been thinking about David Foster Wallace and his big book.
When I first encountered Wallace’s novel I was going through a phase of thinking that it was competence that was killing the novel as a mode of art. Thousands of new novels are published every year, and almost all of them are written and finished with a professional competence that would have amazed Henry Fielding. It’s a glut. Few of these novels make a lasting impression. Wallace’s novel seemed to me then, and still to an extent seems to me now, one way of breaking this logjam: it is sprawly and uneven on a massive scale, and its weird mixture of technical brilliance and technical incompetence (what I take to be deliberate, artistic technical incompetence) makes it like no other novel. As if in a world that had previously been flooded only with expertly achieved photorealist art, and (I suppose) neatly clear-line comic art ... as if in such a world people were suddenly and for the first time shown a De Kooning.
That is, in itself, a cool thing. Also, it’s science fiction, which is also cool. More its form bears an organic, if gnarly, relationship to its theme, which is (it’s nothing new to suggest this about Infinite Jest, I suppose) addiction. Its characters are addicts: addicted (for instance) to drugs or drink, or to the shallow satisfactions of consumer culture, to sport, or to modes of OCD behaviour, or to sex (‘Orin Incandenza like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had internal addictive-sexuality issues’, 289).
Reviewers on the back cover of my paperback copy make this point (‘reading the book is a sort of addiction’ The Spectator; ‘A remarkable satire on American entertainment and addiction … the book’s mixture of maniacal inventiveness and comic brio gradually becomes an addiction itself’ Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph) But this isn’t quite right, I think. The point is not that the reader becomes addicted to this novel, although of course she may (and therefore the novel must be exhilarating junk, which Infinite Jest kind-of is). The point is that the novel becomes addicted to itself. It is the self-regard, the narcissism of addiction that is Wallace’s real theme, not the trappings of addiction themselves. Some of the novel’s best moments embroider this theme—the detailed account of the Boston AA meeting during which it starts to dawn on the reader that the participants are effectively addicted to the process of beating their addiction (‘people who cockily decide they don’t wish to abide by the basic suggestions are constantly going back Out There and then wobbling back in with their faces around their knees and confessing from the podium that they didn’t take the suggestions and have paid full price’ 357); or the way Steeply’s father becomes addicted to watching the TV comedy show M*A*S*H (‘Broadcast television. The program in question was called “M*A*S*H”. The title was an acronym, not a command … the fucking thing ran forever, it seemed’, 639); or the way Joelle starts with a drug addiction but swaps it for an addiction to cleaning after her face is, um, mashed (‘Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean … she was using Kleenex and stale water from a glass by Kate Gompert’s bed’ 736).
Then there’s sentimentality, something else to which it’s too easy to have an addictive relationship. Some deprecate his occasional sentimentality, some have a more ambiguous relationship to it. Some of it is not so much sentimentalism as genuine sensibility (in the eighteenth-century sense). Weirdly offkilter touching stuff. Listening to Linda McCartney singing:
The portrable CD player started in with poor old Linda McCartney as C held Gately and the asst. pharmacist tied him off with an M.D.’s rubber strap. Gately stood there slightly hunched. Fackelmann was making sounds like a long-submerged man coming up for air. C. told Gately to fasten his seatbelt. Urine had turned part of the apt.’s luxury-hardwood floor’s finish soft and white, like soap-scum. The CD playing was one C’d played all the fucking time in the car when Gately had been with him in a car: somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings—as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney—taken and run it through a Kurzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. When the fags called the grass ‘Bob’ it was confusing because they also called C ‘Bob’. Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing—her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups’ voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney—in his Staff room’s wall’s picture a kind of craggy-faced blonde—imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband’s pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C’s depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom. [978]
Poor old Linda McCartney. And in this novel, in our various ways, we’re all her. Even the compulsive stylistic play, here, doesn’t detract: the ‘CD’ and ‘C’d’; the facetiousness of abbreviating the word ‘assistant’ to ‘asst.’ and ‘appartment’ to ‘apt.’ in this, one of the least abbreviated novels ever published; the overuse of apostrophes: “Beatles’s”, “backups’”, “his Staff room’s wall’s picture”. There’s a core reason (to do with our not-very-good-ness) why addiction, and the compulsion to avoid oneself, is so widespread. This CD is the last artwork to which Infinite Jest makes reference. Not counting, of course, of course, the footnotes.
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