About Adam Roberts
Email Address: DrACRoberts@aol.co.uk
Website: http://adamroberts.com
Posts by Adam Roberts
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Long Sunday
It’s been over two months since its last new post: is LS still alive? A shame, if not.
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Friday, July 18, 2008
Reading Comics Event: Exaggeration
This post is going to change the way you think about comics, graphic novels and the visual arts. Forever.
In Reading Comics Wolk makes a good fist of characterizing two dominant comic styles: the ‘Marvel style’ and the anti-Marvel stylings of the comics artists who reacted against those influential visual conventions. The ‘Marvel’ style (Wolk also calls it ‘the standard style’ and ‘generic mainstream drawing’) is ‘designed to read clearly and to evoke the strongest possible somatic response … people and models are partly abstracted and partly modeled, but always within a framework of representation.’ It is ‘quasi-realistic’, a ‘realism pumped up a little, into something whose every aspect is cooler and sexier than the reality we readers are stuck with.’ [50]. So, not just muscles, but enormous muscles everywhere rendered so that every bulge and dip is egregiously visible. Not just a woman in a swimsuit, but a woman with jarringly enormous secondary-sexual characteristics in an improbably figure-hugging and tiny costume. (Neal Adams’ style, for instance, is ‘photorealist’; but it is, nonetheless, an exaggerated photorealism, ‘a pumped-up sort of photorealism, full of very beautiful people, accurate or at least convincing anatomy … and freaky perspectives that heightened the drama’ [51-2] ) You get the idea.
Wolk then discusses those comics, particularly from the 70s and 80s (to today), that were produced in direct reaction against this style: the RAW artists, Spiegelman, Mouly and the like. More broadly Wolk characterizes the reaction against the Marvel style as a deliberate ‘uglification’, though he adds: ‘when I talk about “ugly” cartooning here , I don’t necessarily mean that it repels the eye—most of what I’m talking about is actually pretty compelling … I just mean that it’s the result of a conscious choice to involve a lot of distortion and avoid conventional prettiness of style.’ So the poles, in a nutsell, are: Style A, exaggeratedly beautiful or muscular representation; or Style B, exaggeratedly ugly or raw. There’s your comic art, right there.
That word—exaggeration—is not one that Wolk uses himself. But that was the word that kept chiming in my head as I read his account, and increasingly I found myself wondering if it wasn’t also the thorn stuck so gratingly into the tender soft tissue of my Organ of Comics Appreciation. Does it all have to be so exaggerated? As it might be: not men and women, but heroes; indeed, not heroes but superheroes. Not the moral greys or quotidian human interaction but polarized Good and Evil on a cosmic scale. Not ordinary grit and grime but Robert Crumb’s exaggerated horriblenesses. There are comics, of course, that aim for visual or narrative reticence, and Wolk discusses some of them, but the impression of reading his book right through is that such comics are a minority feature of the whole; that exaggeration is the warp and woof of Comics as a mode (look at the size of Wonder Woman’s boobs! Look at the length of the complete Cerebus the Aardvark!). And that, moreover, it is a bludgeoning, wearying and counter-productive aesthetic strategy.
One word for exaggeration is caricature. Another word is boasting. That first sentence of this post, up top there, is in one sense ‘an exaggeration’. Or as we might say: a lie.
This is not a good ground for art.
Two things occur to me: one is that, perhaps, the exaggerative aspect of comics styling is part of a larger cultural logic: that, in other words, the visual arts in the twentieth-century followed a logic of aesthetic exaggeration—the representational distortions and caricatures of Picasso, the exaggerated scale and simplicity of Rothko—until a state is reached where exaggeration becomes impossible to escape (so, for example, we might argue that photorealism is precisely exaggeratedly mimetic, and so on). But I’m not sure how persuaded I am by this line. A great deal of twentieth-century visual art, surely, works by understatement, obliqueness, reticence.
The other thing that occurs to me is that aesthetic exaggeration is a peacock’s tail phenomenon. Look at these individuals and their exaggeratedly spray-tanned faces (did they really think they looked good?). Thomas Sherman, there, notes that ‘an aesthetic arms race is taking place’ in the small world of these kids. His photos are ‘examples of what anthropologists describe as display behavior, expressive or stylistic behavior engaged in for competitive advantages, most notably in the areas of courtship and threat.’ Comics is a small world, oversupplied with texts, a hothouse in which visual traits get amplified in an attempt to snag the attention of readers. Bigger! Bigger still! More exaggerated! It is the result of courtship behaviour over several generations; comics that are saying, in their various ways, not: ‘judge me aesthetically!’ or even ‘buy me!’ but, more simply, ‘love me!’ Too, too needy: I am not courted.
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Sunday, July 06, 2008
Characterisation, Swiftly
This is by way of self-promotion, I suppose; but also by way of thinking about questions of characterisation more generally: not so much in my novels as in fiction as a whole. The self-promotion concerns my new novel, Swiftly; set in a world in which Gulliver’s Travels was fact not fiction; more specifically in a mid-19th-century Britain where Liliputians and Brobdingnagians have been enslaved, and a war is underway between the United Kingdom and the French. You could buy a copy, if you liked. I wouldn’t mind.
Niall Harrison, over at the Vector editorial blog Torque Control, has hosted a four-way discussion of the novel: himself, Dan Hartland, Victoria Hoyle (of the excellent bookblog Eve’s Alexandria) and Brit SF stalwart Paul Kincaid. It’s a discussion that covers a lot of ground, and is definitely worth your time and attention; to summarise, Niall H. likes the book, Dan H. likes the book too, but with some reservations, Victoria H likes the first two sections of the book, and dislikes the longer latter portion, and doesn’t think the novel works overall, and Paul K hates pretty much everything about it.
There’s a convention that authors should not respond to reviews, and it’s probably a good one. This discussion isn’t exactly a review (although Dan Hartland and Paul Kincaid have both reviewed the novel), but I don’t want to get into the business of trying to justify my own novel in the face of readerly reservation and dislike. There are several reasons for this, but one of the best is that I’m not, as author, in as good a place to judge whether the book works as these four readers are: I’m too close to it, and besides the author is dead. Nevertheless I found the discussion so stimulating to read (I hope not just because it was all about meee) that it seems to me a shame not to air some of the points raised, and one in particular: the question of characterisation in fiction.
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Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Pinkerton
We Valve drones are overjoyed to obey the orders of our New Glorious Leader, telegraphed down from his mountainpeak eyrie: namely that all Valve posts from now on must conform to one or other of the Supreme One’s blogstyles: either sex-in-office/festivus, or alternatively antique-photographs-of-the-American-West. In this spirit I offer up: Pinkerton.
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Friday, June 27, 2008
Pollock
One question: in what sense is this action painting? I suppose the obvious answer would be: well, we’ve all seen footage of Pollock himself leaping and dancing above his supine canvas spooling paint in great dribbly gouts. OK, that’s action, right there, although it would be mere tautology to point out that there’s necessarily action in the activity of any painter as they paint. But look at the Pollockian result: about as far, visually, from action as it is possible to get. This isn’t to deny that it’s an image of great textural interest; and it’s not to deny that it constitutes a brilliant intervention into artistic traditions of form, as the art historians remind us. But the image: a century’s accumulated spiders’-webs; the brambles occluding passage to the princess’s castle; the plughole-hairball to which scores of residents in an appartment have contributed. It is, surely, an image of blockage. I don’t mean to suggest, quite, that it is a representation of blockage ... that those lines of paint ‘represent’ hairs in a hairball, or whatever. I mean that, formally, it embodies entanglement, webbing, obstruction. Now, that’s not to dismiss it of course, as a painting, or suggest that it’s bad art; on the contrary, I think it’s very fine. It is just to suggest that it’s, perhaps, rather ironic to describe this as action painting.
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008
New Weezer
Neweezer, indeed. Waxbanks doesn’t much like it:
I’m so irritated by this album’s insufferable, constant spoofing on (sub)urban pop music that every time the six-minute ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’ comes on, like Rivers Cuomo’s parody of Beck’s parody of Queen, I’m shocked into something like enlightenment. This is not, unfortunately, a good album. (The bonus tracks are good - I can’t keep from smiling at ‘Miss Sweeney.’ Yet Cuomo’s doing accents, damn it.) Like apparently everyone else, I’ve not had much affection for the post-Pinkerton Weezer I’ve heard. I suspect this is more about my limitations than the band’s, but I can’t help thinking Cuomo’s outreach is misguided, that he’s better suited to paranoid self-obsession and triviality wedded to wall-toppling chords. Sure he knows how to write perfect pop tunes, but what difference does that make? He’s not the only one, and ‘Beverly Hills’ isn’t funny enough to not be an affront. That’s how The Red Album feels: insufficiently funny.
I really couldn’t disagree more. The Red Album has, pretty much overnight, become my new favourite album. And it has largely achieved this distinction on the strength of its front-of-shop. For whilst the bonus tracks at the end are OK, and the album sags a little in the middle (the fanfic ‘Heart Songs’ is bland, and ‘Everybody Get Dangerous’ forgettably adolescent) the first three songs on the album are just superb. Not funny? It’s a laugh riot. Check out the indie-rock Village People look of the band on the cover! ‘Pork and Beans’ is a better song than its slightly self-satisfied YouTube-released video suggests, because it approaches the Platonic form of a Weezer song: a piece of mulish self-disdain delivered with Cuomo’s heartbruised Gen-X whine-drone and laid out in sections that alternate quiet verses (that are pinned to a goofy, likeable guitar hook) and loud choruses in which all the guitars flood through the band’s wall-of-soundifying pedals. The opening track, ‘Troublemaker’, rocks back and forth on the most idiotically catchy syncopated rhythmic seesaw ever cut to record, and the lyrics articulate a hilariously preening petty-arrogance: ‘Who needs stupid books?/They are for petty crooks ... I’m gonna be a star/And people will crane necks/To get a glimpse of me and see if I am having sex.’ But the dumb-ass tone keeps collapsing into a sort of Sesame-Street or Mr Rogers mode:
I’m such a mystery
As anyone can see
There isn’t
Anybody else
Exactly quite
Like me.And when
It’s party time
Like 1999
I party by myself
Because I’m such
A special guy.
(Isn’t that ‘exactly quite like me’ nicely Pooh-bear-esque?) ... so that the impression is not of egotist ranting but a kid desperate for attention: simple music; faux-naif words. Of course he parties by himself. Sure, that’s because he’s ‘such/a special guy.’ Its not because he’s a lonely nerd, still quoting Prince from a decade ago for crying out loud, whilst all the cool kids are into whatever it is cool kids are into nowadays.
The full title of ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’ is ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Lived; (variations on a Shaker Hymn)’ which might sound pretentious if the song itself weren’t so awesome. It’s awesome because it takes the step beyond the calculated aesthetic dumbery of ‘Troublemaker’ and ‘Pork and Beans’. It’s dumb, alright: almost six minutes of Cuomo asserting over and over again that he is the greatest man who ever lived (who was ‘born to give and give and give’); but its dumb as a way of being clever, and I like that. The theme is from ‘Lord of the Dance’, and the song is a portmanteau, more like The Incredible String Band’s ‘A Very Cellular Song’, or They Might Be Giant’s ‘Fingertips’ than Queen, I’d say. In fact, unlike ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, it actually is a set of musical and lyrical variations. The lyrical variations move from the rap-star-style aggressive and hypersexual self-assertion with which it starts, and which marvellously it doesn’t quite get right (’I’m like the mage/With the magic spell/You come like a dog/When I ring yo’ bell’) through wonderfully awkwardly articulated hubris in the face of critics (’After the havoc that I’m gonna wreak/No more words will critics have to speak’ ... man, that is a splendid couplet) to a statement of bizarre humanitarian philanthrophy at the end: ‘I am the greatest man that ever lived/I was born to give and give and give.’
The way the song hammers away at its vainglorious central assertion drives home the point that this speaker, so far from believing he is the greatest man that ever lived, has significant problems with self-esteem. The word for this is irony; in performing the role of self-belief, hypertropically magnified, he ends up declaring the exact opposite.
Somebody said all the worlds is stage,
And each of us is a player.
That’s what I’ve been tryin to tell you.
In Act 1 I was struggling to survive.
Nobody wanted my action dead or alive.
Somebody said it, sure. He’s pretending not to know it was Shakespeare; but even the kids who are too cool for school have heard of Shakespeare. Variations on a Shakespeare Hymn; except that, working a hymnal into a rock song raises the specter of Christian Rock. If you asked Americans today ‘who is the greatest man who ever lived?’, we all know what name would top the poll. Singing a deliberately dumb-ass guitarry hymn from the perspective only Christ can occupy that articulates self-loathing via poorly ventriloquised vainglorious assertion (’And I can’t help myself because I was born to shine/And if you don’t like it, you can shove it’) ... you really want to tell me that’s not funny?
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Thursday, June 05, 2008
We Agree? We Don’t?
From Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays, Maps and Legends: ‘All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.’
Chabon seems unafraid of sweeping sentences that begin with the word ‘all’. He also claims ‘all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.’ The lead article in this week’s TLS is a review of Chabon’s book, and also of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: the great comic-book scare and how it changed America, both of which seem kind-of interesting.
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Saturday, May 31, 2008
The Lady’s Portrait
From the Oxford Companion to Henry James (or somesuch; the particulars escape me) I learn that Critics like to challenge the reader’s automatic assumption that the lady of the title is Isabel Archer. Might we not (they say) take the lady to be Madame Merle? How might the novel read if we read it under the assumption that she is the heroine? But just for a moment I want to ponder a different emphasis embodied in the title—that the book is a portrait. That it is, in other words, about portraiture:
I’m a recent convert to this novel, incidentally. When I first read it, as an undergraduate, I hated it. In my callow manner (which I hope one day to outgrow, incidentally) I said to myself: maybe it does end well, but starts glacially, awkwardly and uninvolvingly, and the whole is vitiated by one huge flaw: Archer herself. What I mean by that is that everybody in this novel, male or female, but especially all the men, falls immediately and deeply in love with Isabel. I read it, in the novel, but I simply don’t believe it. As a younger reader, less wary of essentialism, I put it to myself this way: James as a gay man just doesn’t get what it is about some women that makes heterosexual men fall desperately in love with them. He thinks it is a mix of prettiness, sharpness of wit, and brightness of demeanour. It’s not. Actually this may not be as essentialist a way of looking at the question as all that. Proust, by contrast, was a gay man who very evidently did understand what it is about some women that makes some men fall crazily, stupidly, headlessly in love with them. Isabel Archer is very nice, and possesses many charms, but she is no Odette. She’s not even an Albertine. She’s rather annoying.
Of course, everybody has to fall in love with Isabel in order for the machinery of James’s plot to work: for Ralph to want to give her a fortune, for Warburton, Goodwood and Osmond to propose marriage. It is supposed to add piquancy to the tragic dilemma in which the book winds-up that such a thing could happen to an individual so delightful, with whom we (as readers) are so in love ourselves. But, on a first reading, I was much more annoyed than enamoured of Isabel Archer. It seemed a make or break feature of the book; more so than the equally annoying but savingly marginal couple of Pansy and Rosier, as irritating a pair of Dresden china figures ever lifelessly to adorn a narrative.
But I’ve recently reread the novel, and I liked it much better this second time around.
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Monday, May 19, 2008
Snarkiana
Verbum sap: Mahendra Singh’s superb protosurrealist edition of The Hunting of the Snark (or the first two cantos thereof) is now available to download in a handsome pdf format. You need to peruse this if you have not already. It is a thing of startling beauty.
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Monday, May 12, 2008
The War Between Wells and James
Over at Torque Control there’s a good account of, and interesting comment-thread discussion about, last Thursday’s day-symposium on ‘Science Fiction as a Literary Genre’ at Gresham College in London. I couldn’t make the actual day, which was a shame for me, as it sounds like it was a cracker. Luckily Niall Harrison gives good accounts of the papers presented by Neal Stephenson, John Clute, Dr Roger Luckhurst, Andy Sawyer, Dr Martin Willis and Professor Tim Connell. Some interesting points get aired in the comments, not least the divide between university-academic critics or science fiction and the gentlewo/men-amateur scholars, theorists and reviewers, with which the genre is particularly lavishly supplied. I’m particularly sorry I missed Roger Luckhurst’s paper, and not only because he’s a friend of mine and both a ferociously clever man and an excellent speaker; but because, indeed, it was on an especially interesting topic. Click the link and you’ll see: the relationship between SF and Literary Modernism. Niall summarises: ‘he talked about three different implications of modern: modernity, meaning a philosophically and scientifically enlightened society as we have had for the past few hundred years (in theory); modernisation, meaning the technological and ecological consequences of the industrial revolution and urbanisation; and Modernism, meaning the literary movement at the start of the twentieth century. Sf ... is a literature of modernity and modernisation but has an ambivalent relationship, at best, with Modernism.’ In the comments Nick Hubble stands up for Luckhurst’s thesis:
In defence of Luckhurst (whom I don’t know), it has to be said that his position is extremely radical for a specialist in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I should note at this point that this is also my field and so I had absolutely no problem following him because I’m familiar with the idiom and the general outlines of the positions ... What was especially striking was that he more-or-less said that sf was THE literature of modernity and concluded that what was modern about it was the absence of Modernism. People in the field of Modern and Contemporary Literature do not usually say this kind of thing (and that’s putting it mildly). So for me, that was EXCITING. I can see that others might be underwhelmed but that is because they don’t share the same underlying assumptions as people who work in Modern and Contemporary Literature. This was succinctly defined by Luckhurst as being that Henry James won the war with Wells and so came to dominate the modern definition of literary fiction. Of course, the reason others don’t share this assumption is because it is demonstrably false - only in the minds of academics and the literary elite did James win this war; the heirs of Wells, from Orwell onwards, inherited the real world and modernism burnt itself out by 1940. Therefore, what we were seeing in Luckhurst’s paper was the beginning of a sea change (well, it’s been coming some time) by which received academic opinion is transforming itself and recanting the last 100 years or so.
This is, as the thread notes, one of the core arguments of Luckhurts’s recent (and excellent) cultural history of SF, Science Fiction (Polity 2005). I reviewed this book when it came out, for an academic journal, and although I was very positive I also carped a little. Looking back the carping was ungracious: I complained that for a self-proclaimed cultural history of SF it was a shame Luckhurst didn’t include discussion of film and TV SF. But this was actually a reviewerish faux pas, criticising a book by somebody else because they didn’t choose to write it exactly as I would have done. You see it so happens that I also published a history of SF, in which one of my main arguments was that since the 1970s SF has, by and large, jumped media from written to visual forms--but of course it’s asinine to criticise Luckhurst for thinking for himself rather than sharing my peculiar views. The other of my main arguments is that SF begins in 1600. Luckhurst takes the much more orthodox view that SF begins in the latter half of the 19th-century, which is to say, at the same time (more or less) and determined by the same cultural logics (more or less) as Modernism. And as such his overall thesis was much more radical, and much more exciting, than I gave it credit for in my review. So, sorry about that: and you should buy Luckhurst’s book. It’s very good indeed. Better than mine, if I’m frank.
Now, positing Modernism in terms of ‘a war between Wells and James’ is, clearly, a slightly polemical way of putting it; and asserting either the victory of James, or dedicating oneself to a Maquis-style battle on Wells’s behalf, lacks a certain nuance. It’s a shorthand, not an all-encompassing critical description. Keen says ‘I’m not denying the influence of James—I suppose I am trying to reflect the bifurcated culture: James only won in realm of elitist literary culture and the academic modernist industry (he didn’t win in the wider world).’ He goes on ‘admittedly, those spheres are very influential and have cast a distorting material effect over the wider culture’. I wonder whether he’s right to assert that ‘current Modernist studies are showing signs of this position [i.e. the victory of James] breaking down; but as is so often the case, the immediate result of this will be a massive retrenchment with hordes of top scholars declaring contemporary literature to have gone wrong and demanding a return to James (this is starting to happen).’ Coincidentally I have recently been rereading James and my reaction has been a sort of ingenuous surprise at how good he is. That looks rather stupid written down there like that, but its been my reaction, prompted in part by a long period (going back to my undergraduate experience) of not especially liking James. I’ll say more about that in a day or two. But for now I’ll close with this: in my history I cover the period of Modernism in two chapters, one for ‘high’ cultural Modernism and one for Pulps like E E Doc Smith, although my main thesis is (given the, I argue, deeper roots of the genre) they’re basically the same thing. By this I mean that both popular sf and High Modernist art are responding in similar ways to a similar cultural logic: that, in a nutshell, High Modernism is sf. Proust’s Recherche, say, whatever critics have said about it, is actually a time-travel story deeply indebted to Wells’s Time Machine. Similar cases can be made for Kafka, Marinetti, Eliot etc. Enough! Or too much.
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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Authentic Frontier Gibberish
[Title ref: not that you need it]. The frontier in this case is the 1960s, which was a motherfucker of a decade that knew where it was at. Or so I hear. Continuing the haphazard process of transferring my numerous CDs to jpg format so as to bung them on my MP3 player, I unearthed Vintage: the Very Best of Moby Grape, which I hadn’t listened to for ages. Now it goes without saying that Moby Grape were excellent. They were simply excellent. But one of the nice things about the Vintage best-of is the way it includes not just variants and demos and things, but snippets of in-studio conversation. For example, here is producer David Rubinson speaking to drummer Don Stevenson by way of asking him to have another go at ‘Fall on You’ (from the band’s superb 1967 debut album);
Don would you do me one favour, just for me? Play that rhythm that you play in the bridge all the way through the tune. Dum tackum, coomcoom tackum, coomcoom tack--Just try that. Right? You know what I mean? Try driving from the top to the bottom man. Just make the cuts. Alright? Because it lifts right off the ground in the bridge, man, and there’s a reason for it. You get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at ... Alright! From the top! Ba-pa-ba-pa-ba-pa that’s where it’s at!
I suppose it’s the sense that we’ve eavesdropping on actual unguarded 1960s-chatter that makes me like this so much. They really spoke like that. If I wrote a character from the 60s who said something like ‘you get into a groove and it drives like a motherfucker and that’s where it’s at’ I’d be ridiculed. Yet it turns out that that truly was where their groove was at. Vintage indeed.
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Thursday, April 24, 2008
How Best to Describe Keith Richards’s Face?
A nice piece in today’s TLS by Alan Jenkins about the Stones, ostensibly a review of the new Scorcese concert film Shine a Light, but actually an opportunity to ponder not just the persistence of the group (‘What’s in it for Jagger?’ Jenkins wonders: ‘a man who qualified a few years ago for his free bus pass, who could almost certainly buy the Beacon Theater and get change from a week’s wages, but who keeps whirling and strutting and leaping, pointing and shouting and pouting through a whole longish set without once looking as if he’d rather put his feet up with a DVD and a glass of Pomerol?’) but their continuing hold on the popular imagination. Why are we all still so fascinated by this superannuated collective? Richards, in Jenkins’s words, only ‘approximates’ playing the ‘chugging Chuck Berry riffs that helped make the Stones rich and famous forty years ago’ (approximation is ‘all he seems prepared to do now’). More, the band ‘haven’t produced a body of great or even memorable songs since the burst of inspiration that gave the world Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street in quick succession from 1969 to 1972.’ Jenkins makes an exception for the ‘odd one-off such as “Start Me Up”’, which may be being too dismissive. (The first Stones album I bought was Tattoo You, and, listening to it a few weeks ago, I was struck by what a fine album it still is). But this is not to quarrel with his key point, which seems to me unarguable: it’s been many decades since the Stones released a markworthy album.
All of which is prelude to the point of this post. Journalists and commentators who write on the Stones are locked in an unofficial competition to come up with the best new way of describing Keith Richards’s extraordinary face. Q magazine recently called it ‘heroically wrinkled like a tortoise’s testicle.’ Here is Jenkins’s go:
“Keef” himself, smoking continuously and looking more and more like the love-child of W. H. Auden and Freddy Krueger, has been so close to vanishing into rock legend so often that no one could begrudge him back-from-the-dead act, his rogueish vamping and leering.
Nice, that. The Auden ref smuggles in our sneaky admiration for Richards qua poet (more than one commentator has called him ‘Byronic’), where the Krueger allusion registers the way his face has increasingly assumed an alarming, poured- and striated-latex mask-like quality. It is not so much lined as ridged, like the roof of a dog’s mouth. It is monstrous, in a fascinating way. I suppose its appeal inheres in a more thoroughgoing form of the same impulse that moved Pete Townshend to smash up expensive guitars on stage—the decades-long smashing up of a beautiful face in the service of the same aim: an offering to the presiding Rock and Roll deities of destruction and nihilism. There’s something splendid about its decay.
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Thursday, April 17, 2008
‘Over London, By Rail’ (1872)
My lovely home-town, as beautiful today as it has ever been:
This famous image is by Gustave Doré, of course; one of his many illustrations for Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage (1872).
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
And what? And what? of the House-man?
Not this House-man
This Housman.
Although actually there’s a certain resemblance there, I think.
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Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Worst Titles of Henry James
James? Fine writer. His titles? Classics, all: Portrait of a Lady. What Maisie Knew. The Princess Casamassamissima. Models of the titler’s art, every last one.
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