Off to the SLSA-conference. Hope to do some live-blogging. Also Joseph McElroy will be speaking — I’ve never read a book of his, but his name pops up, always, when there’s a mention of both technology and postmodernist fiction…

http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2004/10/joseph_mcelroy.html
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3040
http://www.josephmcelroy.com/

Benjamin Gaulon put up two new movies which show his Pong-game, played on the wall of an 19th century building in St. Brieuc, during the ArtRock festival there:

http://recyclism.com/deponggame/dePongArtRoc768K_Stream001.mov
http://recyclism.com/deponggame/dePongArtRoc768K_Stream002.mov

More on this work:
http://recyclism.com/deponggame.php

Summertime as performed live by Shelly Manne & his Men in 1956 and, played immediately afterwards by itunes, In the Black by Motorhead. Although these tracks are very different (fifties west coast bop versus rock-n-roll-heavy-metal), they also are in the same category — for me. Maybe both pieces exemplify ‘the perfect track’? Manne’s precise and subtile drumming propels what is basically just another version of a classic song, it ensures that what could have been dreary, becomes exciting to listen to. Motorhead is straightforward, completely formulaic, yet very exciting because it is thight and every note, every chord, every word comes at, well, the right moment. Is it simplicity? Not quite. Is it restraint plus exuberance? Maybe. Is it the miracle where a song that could’ve been just as easily boring, becomes an exciting piece of music? If that’s it, I want to entangle that ‘magic formula’, I’d like to know how it is ‘programmed’.

During breakfasts I’m reading ‘indeterminacy 1960-1970’ from Michael Nymans Experimental Music, Cage and Beyond, a book I’ve never picked up, because of my dislike for Glass & Nyman-styled minimal music. But this book is very good. (Read it, buy it). It gives an excellent overview of Cardew’s compositional strategies and formulas (excellent for the lay-musician that I am). I love Cardew’s The Great Learning (or what I’ve heard of it, the total piece runs on for several hours), and I’m inclined to say that it is actually one of the masterpieces of all times. It succeeds in totally transforming our idea of art. (And yes, it is possible to look beyond the Maoist ideology it was supposed to get across).

This is Cardew on discipline: “Discipline is not to be seen as the ability to conform to a rigid rule structure, but as the ability to work collectively with other people in a harmonious and fruitful way. Integrity, self-reliance, initiative, to be articulate (say, on an instrument) in a natural, direct way; these are the qualities necessary for improvisation. Self-discipline is the necessary basis for the desired spontaneity, where everything that occurs is heard and responed to without the aid of arbitrarily controlled procedures and intellectual labor.” (Nyman, p. 126)

This makes sense, certainly, in a musical context. (Probably can be ripped apart and de(con)structed totally when interpreted by some liberal/conservative against a Maoist/revolutionary prespective (bring on Pol Pot)).

So I’m wondering what the connection is between Manne’s Summertime, Motorhead and Cardew. (And no, I cannot substitute just whatever other track here, not Lady Fury ‘Too Much Drugs in Ur System’, Earl Browns ‘Octet 1 for 8 Loudspeakers’ or Camille’s ‘Ta Douleur’, to mention a few other tracks that I’ve recently downloaded and like very much). Not that there has to be a connection…

Cornelius Cardew: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Cardew
Motorhead mp3 see: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/06/dj_compilation_.html
Michael Nyman: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521653835

Uh, undelete, please? I’ve accidentaly erased all the notes for my paper on mp3-blogs. I know how it happened. I think I’ll just start all over again.

… with a marrriage of friends in Driebergen, including a party, sleeping over in a yurt (Mongolian tent), 2 deejays, a Taiwanese professor who sings ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’ in overtones, self-made marriage rituals that yet seem ‘authentic’ and move the heart (I missed that part), Serge who played trumpet while dancing to the music of the deejays (and nobody cared), and twice a performance of Oorbeek (at 23.30 and at 3.30 at night), with me playing a guitar that I wasn’t able to tune (too much noise) and decided therefore to untune/detune (?) completely. Out of tune, yet somehow also in tune. (Everything is possible). Culture is what people do together — that’s what I thought, enjoying to just sit around, be there on the grass, next to the yurts. Who needs art when people are together? Art is what the community makes. But then: how much I love and need it, to be alone, read alone, think alone, write alone: to be outside of that community, not to be around those yurts, but wander in the forest.

‘In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.’

So Vladimir Nabokov in ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ which introduces his Lectures on Literature (ed. Fredson Browers, Harvest Book, San Diego, 1980).

As I’ve probably remarked here before, I’m not a big fan of Nabokov. Actually I’ve never finished one of his novels, not even Pale Fire. 40, 50, 60 pages long I think, ‘wow, this is great’, and then I lose interest and see no reason whatsoever to continue. But I thought his lectures might be enjoyable, and I was curious what he’s made of Ulysses.

But I found myself reading diagonally after a few pages. Nabokov’s strategy seemed to’ve be trying to make one love a book by retelling the story, reading out passages and making you image what the fictional world of the novel looks like. His insists on this visualization as being the key to reading novels. That’s why for him it’s so important that “(w) have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details.” Apart from the fact that it’s unsure that we can do this with a picture, I doubt whether this is always so important. (If it is, the novel would surely have been superseded by the movie). In any case, it explains, for me, why Nabokov is so low on my list. I enjoy the language of language, and then the sound of language, and the thought of language, much more.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to enjoy or to be learned in Nabokov’s Lectures. Like, when, at the end of the lecture on Jane Austen, he states that for young author learning to write means ‘free his language from cliches, to eliminate clumsiness, to form a habit of searching with unflinching patience for the right word, the only right word which will convey with the utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought.’ (p. 60) That sure is something to think about when you’re spitting out a few hundred of words, rewriting without having the time to rewrite, another text. Pff.

‘Ein neuer Service im Netz war früher an der Idee der Software orientiert, eine halbwegs stabile Versionsnummer rauszubringen. Heutzutage ist alles, gerne auch beliebig lange, Beta.’

Sacha Kosch, WEB 2.0 Einleitung, in Debug 98, http://www.de-bug.de/texte/4137.html.

(I’m reading through 2 years of DeBug issues).

PS, the catchword is of course ‘perpetual beta’. Knew that, but some things one forgets when reading a different language.

http://decodeunicode.org/; a wiki with about all the unicode-characters! So, thousands and thousands an thousands of characters from all written languages.

‘Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference material, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.’

Allan Kay & Adele Goldberg, ‘Personal Dynamic Media’, Computer 10 (3): p. 31-41, March 1977. (Quoted from Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort (eds.) The New Media Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge &c, 2003, p. 394.)

We have that, don’t we.

Close Encounters is thet title of the conference where I’ll be speaking for 20 minutes on wednesday 9.00-10.30, in a panel with Tobias van Veen and Trace Reddell. Tobias asked me to propose a paper in the panel that he and Trace Reddell were proposing & we got accepted: http://www.slsa.nl.

So more than 10 years after my 4-year stint as PhD student at the University of Amsterdam ended, “I’ll be back”. Richer qua experience, being more & widely well-read and with a string of published articles in my bag. But also: not having written anything for an academic magazine ever (hmm, or does writing a review for Krisis count?). Also I have never spoken at an academic conference. I am looking forward to 3 days of listening to papers. I hope I will be able to do some live blogging.

Btw, I will be speaking about blogs & mp3-blogs, memory, hoarding, mixing and the transformation of, well, the culture of enjoying music. (Still have to find the right words, les mots justes).