Kickstarted, completed:
It’s as though Rohan Wealleans had an intensely productive meeting with a mandala, Poison Ivy started crafting her own vines from hemp and household fabrics, flOw assumed the emergent design we projected upon the gameplay, and the Rapture was always supposed to involve sand.
The making of:
One more conference paper for the road. I’m presenting a paper at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-La-Salle in France, for the colloquium ‘Malcolm Lowry, encore’ in June / July 2012. The paper pulls together the initial theory-base of my thesis, with the focus firmly on Ultramarine and, perhaps, its role in defining or delimiting Lowry’s later fiction.
If the art of writing is imitation the author has mastered it; if reconstruction enters into it he has yet some way to go, for he has not attempted to fuse the objective and subjective elements of his narrative into a whole.
– Review of Ultramarine, in The Times Literary Supplement: 13 July, 1933.
Ultramarine was received by contemporaneous critics as a promising first novel, albeit one lacking any integration between the subjective and objective. Further, in acknowledging his imitation of and reliance upon the prior writing of Nordahl Grieg and Conrad Aiken, even Lowry would seem to pigeonhole the text as ‘that usual self-conscious first novel’ (U, 89-90).
The proposed paper considers Ultramarine in light of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the genotext and the phenotext, and reframes the impact of the novel on Lowry’s later writing. Kristeva describes the genotext as ‘a process, moving through zones that have relative and transitory borders’, which has the effect of organising space for the text’s generation and signals the emergence of object and subject within the text. The genotext of Ultramarine thus encompasses Lowry’s 1927 sea voyage as well as the influential ‘donor texts’ upon which he drew. I argue that following the publication of Ultramarine, its phenotext – initially a matter of pure denotation – collapses back into Lowry’s default genotext, that topographical space enabling his production of new texts.
It is precisely because Ultramarine maintains the separation of Dana Hilliot’s obsessively subjective mind and the objective exterior world that the novel demonstrates a foundational process of Lowry’s oeuvre, the sought-after reconciliation of the individual and the perceived order of the natural world. The porous boundaries between The Ship Sails On, Blue Voyage and Ultramarine reflect those relative and transitory borders through which the genotext-process moves, creating space for what Kristeva terms ‘the advent of the symbolic’ and what Lowry would later anticipate to be ‘the voyage that never ends’.
I’ll present the paper in English, but most of the colloquium will be en français, which for me will mean a lot of note-taking, desperately trying to work out what’s being said, and probably recording and later trying to translate the papers. But it’s the first Lowry-specific conference I’ve heard of in the past few years, so I can’t miss it. And the prospect of being down and out in Paris and London, with Jen, is reason enough to risk whatever schoolboy French I’ve managed to retain. Insert generic upbeat French saying here.
I’m looking forward to the Australian Modernist Studies Network conference in February 2012 – not only is it to be held locally in an art deco hotel, it’ll be the first conference where I’ll be presenting directly from my thesis research, and not drawing a critical analogy through another set of texts. Both approaches work well, I’ve found, but this way there’s a more immediate benefit to the all-consuming thesis.
Lowry’s treatment of emotion fascinates me in no small part because he seems so unaware of what he’s doing, particularly in his work around the time of Ultramarine. It’s as though what I’m calling his ‘emotional choreography’ is entirely instinctual – something to be thought about later, away from other people and perhaps even after publication, as Lowry’s well-thumbed and thoroughly emended first edition of Ultramarine would suggest.
My abstract, below, picks up on the textual variance work I’ve been doing since coming back from Vancouver and UBC, and uses the basic ‘genetic’ comparisons between editions to examine Lowry’s treatment of emotion and the lack thereof:
Malcolm Lowry’s critically neglected sea novel Ultramarine (1933) displays a curious segregation of fluid, subjective narration and broken dialogue in vacuo. While the partitions between dialogue and interior monologue reinforce the protagonist’s initial isolation from both ship and crew, they also encourage the reader to project or transfer the protagonist’s ‘authentic’ emotions onto the crew’s commonplace discussions and actions.
The paper considers early textual variants of – and Lowry’s post-publication revisions to – key scenes in chapters four and five that reinforce the early separation of Dana Hilliot’s emotion and the crew’s acedia. Lowry’s rearrangement of these scenes from the short story form to that of the novel allows him to establish an emotional counterpoint: from the failed action of an ill-advised physical confrontation, borne of sublimated emotion, Lowry shifts tone and depicts Hilliot’s failure to act as a result of his desire to imitate and adopt the customs of the crew, to project upon himself the apparent lack of emotion of the men he admires.
I argue that while Lowry’s stated aim of capturing both the “power and purity” of Nordahl Grieg’s realist novel The Ship Sails On and the emotive surrealism of Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage resulted in the apparent disjunction of Ultramarine, Lowry’s primary achievement in the novel is one of emotional choreography, facilitating the sustained emotional development of his protagonist. The temporary sublimation of intense emotion, as Lowry displays it, results not in the inability to act, but in the inevitable failure of any resulting action. If mind and body can react simultaneously, however, emotion and action may align constructively. Thus as Hilliot’s emotions begin to diffuse ‘naturally’ from his monologues into his interactions with the crew, the young man in turn becomes more receptive to affect, a process that gestures towards the parallel development of his mind and body.
Good times.
After thirty-something hours in transit – some of which were well spent walking up to and tobogganing down from the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu – Vancouver comes into focus. People seem happy here. We leave. Get on board a ferry to Victoria, B.C., where a steady stream of horses, carriages, tourists and bicycle-hockey players clog the streets. I learn to look the other way first when I’m crossing the road, though I still feel like I’m daring myself not to face the traffic that my hindbrain is sure is coming from the right.
There’s a campus with more green space than recreated gothic buildings. The university bookstore has a proud display of bongo drums and collegiate-fonted frisbees. Malcolm Lowry books are now to be found in the ‘Canadian Literature’ shelves, which temporarily solves my frustration with the omnipresence of Robert Lowell collections. A room full of driven, data-hungry North American digital humanists starts clapping. Star Wars jokes begin to pile up. Are we building the first Death Star or laying hard-vacuum foundations for the second? No one really seems to care, but clearly we’re not identifying with the Rebels.
Classes start. Note to self: bring more data next time. Organise it better. Though organisation is ostensibly one prong of the week-long course’s trident [this metaphor made better sense in my notebook], there are many more post-it notes and permanent markers than I’d anticipated for the computer-based workshop. I begin talking, thinking out loud about cataloguing or documenting journeys, differentiating between the real and imagined trips, the travel diaries and the novel, and the grey area between them. I talk further with a researcher from Vilnius, the city directly beneath the pendulum of European trade.
The trouble is that the grey areas between fact and fiction are, to me, the more interesting part. Why it matters, for example, that Lowry thought of something (anything) when he was in a certain place. Recreating whatever analog waveform he had with my own (downsampled, low bit-rate) digital version. By Thursday I’ve abandoned my plans to create a workable database of the information I’m pulling from the air and start making notes about the tools everyone else is using. Omeka. Anything from MIT or Georgia State or Texas. Oh-so-briefly glossed and unnamed TEI interfaces that seem to allow textual and visual annotation on top of whatever OCR magic is already going on. The point is clear, though there’s little initial glimmer for putative funding applications – get all of your data first, throw it into an XML or JSON database, and only then start worrying about which to use. It’s a problem for another day, another research strand.
In the evenings, walk around Victoria with Jen. Dodge the vendors and the buskers. Come to the sudden realisation that the Fairmont Empress Hotel, viewed from a certain angle, looks like nothing more than an ivy-shrouded zombie, reaching out to the harbour with spindly cyprus arms.
Back in Vancouver, and straight to UBC and the library’s Special Collections, which houses the most extensive Lowry collections I could imagine. I photograph like mad, fill out new personal / research use copy forms every couple of hours. I probably verge on annoying their (wonderfully helpful) desk staff by requesting a new folder every fifteen minutes. Wander down the rabbit-hole of Lowry’s filmscript for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, a script so long that, if it were to be filmed, would have been in excess of four hours. Did Lowry realise he wasn’t supposed to do the director’s job for him, or did it simply not matter to him?
There are parkways and boulevards at UBC, and it doesn’t seem to be an affectation. A short walk from the main campus and the fraternity housing – through the permeable bubble of Monod’s abstract kingdom, perhaps – I’m walking through a Platonic Suburbia. Old men water their lawns, mow them the next day, water them the following. If I lived here, I think, I’d be home by now.
Back in the library, I find Lowry’s own copy of the first edition of Ultramarine (1933), annotated in his hand, and start to get really excited. His deletions, additions and emendations made it into subsequent editions of the text, but there are sentences here I haven’t read before. There’s a tendency to cut off Hilliot’s inner monologue with ellipses in the first edition; by the later versions it’s been standardised to an em-dash for inner monologue and ellipses for spoken dialogue. “God” is often struck through, and replaced with “Christ”. A paragraph’s worth of Hilliot’s musings on the second page is marked to be deleted, and only three lines make the cut. Questioning his motives for the voyage, Hilliot wonders in the first edition “Had that been, was this him here, himself?” These questions of self are subsumed in my later edition, partially buried in the text, but to catch that glimmer of the writer’s process is only just short of magical.
We’re altogether too excited to see raccoons and otters in Stanley Park, to see the Lost Lagoon, to be tourists. I start talking with a bookseller about Lowry, but having switched into holiday mode for the weekend, my facts aren’t entirely straight, and I’m not sure his were either. I hear another version of the story where Lowry and friends take a mission into the city to gather more alcohol, and end up walking by a church. Lowry is briefly lost, but shortly found kneeling in front of an altar. “He’s praying,” his friends say, “We should leave him be.” As it turns out, he was weeping over a bottle of gin.
In the Vancouver Daily Province, 1939, Lowry writes:
It is difficult, of course, to pin down the original of any character in fiction for few, even when drawn from life, escape wholly from belonging to the composite order of architecture. An attitude from this person, an idiosyncrasy from that, Smith’s bowler hat, Jones’ sea boots – such are the materials which go to the creating of a character in a novel. In this respect Mr Chips, like Sherlock Holmes or Stalky, is no exception. We may track him down to his lair in the real world but he will seem, in the flesh, both more and less than the character for which he was the point of departure.
I write in my (growing) notebook that my Lowry, the Lowry of today, is both more and less than the real person who lived and wrote. Today that statement seems trite.
On our last evening in Vancouver, we are kindly driven out to Dollarton by the author of Vilnius: City of Strangers. We find the forest walk near where Lowry and his second wife had a squatter’s shack on the shore, and I pose next to the sign. The place was Eden for Lowry, a paradise just far enough away from the city to write and revise. I put my feet into the water, and try to think about coming back with a bottle of Bols and an unidentifiable paperback book. I take a photograph of a forest path that almost certainly didn’t lead to a spring, wish that the oil refinery across the water still had the word ‘SHELL’ written on it, and wish further that, like Lowry, I could have seen a plume of smoke obscure the ‘S’, leaving only the promise of Dollarton’s opposite.
At the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (POPCAANZ) conference in Auckland (June/July 2011) I’ll be talking about graphic novels. Specifically, about a rather fantastic series called The Unwritten (Carey/Gross: Vertigo). The abstract, infra, is more closely related to my thesis than it may seem on the surface, the paper being something of a testing ground for critical terms I’m thinking about commandeering from Julia Kristeva.
The narrative of Mike Carey’s ongoing graphic novel series The Unwritten relies upon loci in the textual actual world that intersect with locations in popular and literary fiction. Carey’s series, however, is less an exploration of literary geography than a continually deferred quest for those loci where stories interconnect and where dialogue between these texts may commence.
The series’ horizontal intertextuality enacts its conceit – that stories are porous and interpenetrating, that the so-called ‘seals’ between ‘separate’ fictions are imperfect, and that an inevitable textual convergence engenders (or will engender) both abstract knowledge and authorial power.
By focusing on the real and nebulous geographical nexus points around which the series revolves – primarily the Villa Diodati, Dickens’ London, and the Platonic ocean of Moby Dick, Sindbad and Kipling’s “How The Whale Got His Throat” – the paper surveys Carey’s dialogue with major literary works, and examines the implied Platonic library of written and unwritten fiction from which Carey borrows.
I’d finished reading through Carey’s Lucifer (as defined by Neil Gaiman in Sandman: Season of Mists) last year and was looking for more of the same; I found a series that nods its heads at apparent sources almost immediately – it jumps from the Harry Potter juggernaut to The Books of Magic to Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch without pause for breath – then dismantles that web of simple intertexts in the first few pages.
The series captures something of the narrative-based magic that caught me when I read The Literals, a spin-off / plot extender from Bill Willingham’s Fables series, but The Unwritten has more mystery at this early stage – we’re still guessing about motivations other than authorial power and narrative control over the textual actual world.
(I do hope that in the time leading up to the POPCAANZ conference the series won’t diverge from my planned paper. It’s the risk, I suppose, of looking at a serialised narrative-in-progress. When the narrative arc finally closes, my paper will either appear marginally prescient or terribly misguided.)
Image: Yuko Shimizu‘s cover art for The Unwritten.
This was something of an odd project, looking back. Fun, though.
As a minor part of my BA Hons degree at the University of Otago (NZ) I put together an html collection of annotations I’d scraped from the first hundred pages or so of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the section that Eco refers to as “a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the bottom of the hill.” (Reflections on The Name of the Rose, 41) I leaned on the excellent The Key to The Name of the Rose by Adele Haft et al (U. of Michigan Press, 2006) for translations of the non-English passages and the occasional fact-check on my own annotations – it’s a fantastic set of notes to accompany an initially difficult text. I learnt html as I made the miniature site, so there’s virtually no optimisation or thought towards a user interface happening here – no XML, no CSS, nothing but the basics. And a few typos for good measure.
The fun part was putting together an interactive fiction (IF) annotation, using the platform-independent programming language Inform 7 by developer Graham Nelson. I found it to be very intuitive, considering my lack of programming chops, and one of 7′s main attractions to me was the natural English sentence construction while you’re coding. From my experience a few years ago, it’s not even coding, really – just affecting a slightly different manner of speaking. To help readers up Eco’s hill, the IF can be accessed on a stand-alone page, or as part of the full presentation – including a short introductory statement and IF guide – all hosted by the Otago postgrad wiki. I’d actually written an IF module for Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth as part of my coursework the year before, where the player guided Gulley Jimson towards various locations of Inspiration and Colour, dodging bills and debtors. I haven’t run that .z5 file since ’05, and it’s probably languishing with the rest of my digital ephemera from then, but I’ll try to dig it up, bit rot be damned.
I’m heading to Vancouver in June to do some archival research at UBC’s special collections, and I’ve managed to receive a tuition scholarship to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute to be held at the University of Victoria in the first week of that month, in the Data Discovery, Management and Presentation course. My presentation was lacking in the above projects, and I kind of made up the management aspect as I figured out how html worked, so I’ll being taking a lot of notes. Five years later and the possibilities of digital humanities research – and the promise of grants available for digital editions alone – are immense. I think that, in order to avoid DH being relegated to a mere vector, there should always be some kind of interactive component if that’s at all possible, and DH projects must be web-based and open-source. Data must be available for users to mash up, and creators mustn’t be too prescriptive in determining their projects’ use-cases.
The Eco IF, as I wrote it, was a guided experience that constrained user efforts to find out more – one had to laboriously type out “Ask William about …” every time a new annotation topic was presented by the parser, and that kind of repetitive data discovery simply isn’t fun. Someone really should work out a way to merge a chatterbot with an IF NPC, or better yet, a parser. I’d play that game.
Gene Roddenberry’s first draft of his pitch for the original Star Trek series [pdf link] seems to be doing the rounds now, almost two years after the linked version of the document was first put online. Had it been accepted verbatim in a parallel universe, inhabitants of a blessed alternate world would have seen a satanic red-skinned Spock advising Captain Robert M. April on board the mighty S.S. Yorktown.
The Star Trek format, as it was described in 1964, hinges on what Roddenberry calls the “Parallel Worlds” concept – a misnomer, really, since the pitch suggests it’s more about Possible Worlds.
Astronomers express it this way:
Ff2 (MgE) – C1Ri1 x M = L/So
Or to put it in simpler terms, by multiplying the 400,000,000,000 galaxies (star clusters) in the heavens by an estimation of average stars per galaxy (7,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), we have the approximate number of stars in the universe, as we understand it now. And so…
… if only one in a billion of these stars is a “sun” with a planet…
… and only on in a billion of these is of earth size and composition…
… there would still be something near 2,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worlds with a potential of oxygen-carbon life…
… or (by the most conservative estimates of chemical and organic probability), something like three million worlds with a chance of intelligent life and social evolution similar to our own.
The worlds and civilisations could be described as parallel in a thematic sense to our own (bipedal humanoids with dramatic tension just waiting to be precipitated by a lean and mentally capable starship captain with a “colorfully complex personality”), but we’re talking less about parallel worlds as quantum physicists might understand it than a single parallel future where probability is turned on its head.
The same site that hosts the draft pitch – http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/ – has, among other canonical documents, the official story guideline document for Quantum Leap [pdf], that Bakula-heavy sci-fi take on Heaven Can Wait. Bakula’s Sam isn’t exactly dealing with parallel worlds either: while Sam’s original timeline can be altered as he changes his future to resemble our own, the guideline docs make it clear that there’s a dominant (textual actual) world, and there’s little predestination involved. I couldn’t find a guideline doc for Sliders, a show that was always more an excuse to explore alternate histories than think about parallel worlds, but that’s probably for the best. If F.R. Leavis were to compare the do-gooder QL and Sliders, he’d probably lump the latter in with anything by Thomas Hardy, all for its apparent lack of morality.
Reading the two docs I could find, though, I was reminded of the 2007 BBC4 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives about Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett and his physicist father Hugh Everett, who developed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, reconfiguring the entire field when he was only 24. E traces his father’s path through scientific theories, interpretations and thought experiments in the absence of the observer; like many of E’s songs, the documentary creates a fair amount of tension between the oddly fascinating (American suburbia, parallel universes, dog-faced boys) and a gradually creeping depression (ennui, denial of academic standards, rejection).
I’m turning out just like my father
Though I swore I never would
Now I can say that I have a love for him
I never really understood
What it must have been like for him
Living inside his headI feel like he’s here with me now
Even though he’s dead- Eels, “Things the Grandchildren Should Know”
Designating the genotext in a text requires pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices … and melodic devices … in the way semantic and categorical fields are set out in syntactic and logical features, or in the economy of mimesis….
– Julia Kristeva
The genotext, as I understand it, is about creating space for the creation of a text. It’s a set of inputs and processes that results, almost algorithmically, in a textual object. Designating these processes is approximate to a full act of annotation, which, I suppose, is always the aim. The concept is appealing because it’s couched firmly in the language of genetics, which itself borrowed from textual sources once the DNA-object began to be thought of as a text. Or a palimpsest, at least.
But strange things happen when you start thinking of algorithms that simultaneously create space and allow for creation.
Everything belongs to an ecology; everything is enmeshed. A superorganism that plays to this maxim tends to succeed (witness Detroit’s near-perfection in the 2004 finals, acting as one to halt the attacks of Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Karl Malone and Gary Payton). Given LeBron James’ 7.3 assists per game so far this season, it would be misleading to cast him as something resembling a selfish gene willingly enmeshed in the Miami Heat superorganism, but the comparison is tempting nonetheless.
There’s a vested interest in screening as many Milwaukee Bucks games as possible here in Australia, as I understand it. Something to do with cheering on Victoria’s Andrew Bogut, perhaps some lingering interest in Milwaukee’s character-of-a-coach Scott Skiles. But it’s probably national pride at producing a chunky seven-footer who can jog, catch a ball and sometimes manage a hook shot.
Bogut is a support player who happens to be a starting center: appearing tired from the first quarter tip-off, he passes as soon as he can if he’s above the free-throw line, lies in wait for on-target passes, lets himself be pushed to the edge of his lazy hook-shot range. His advantage may lie in his apparent laziness - when the Bucks need a big guy, he’s almost always in the right place, preferring the left of the circle on offense and the right on defense. He’ll push himself past what appears to be early exhaustion to contribute to a team block, or a flat-footed dunk. He won’t shoot unless he’s close enough to touch the rim with a leaning jump, usually a left hook over a leaning right shoulder; he’s uncomfortable putting the ball on the floor and moving beyond a quick pivot. Aesthetically speaking, though, as a center he’s got nothing on Dwight Howard, whose deltoids alone could support Orlando’s hoop dreams. In short, Bogut has very little drive energy, and what space he inhabits is usually created by a mismatch.
Watching ‘The Heatles’ – thank LBJ for that clanger – take on Milwaukee in Miami is like peering in on a fight between a colony of fire ants and … I don’t know … Bambi’s mother? Will that do? James’ economy of mimesis is in overdrive.
Somewhere in the second quarter of the basketball game, patterns begin to emerge. Miami’s guards recognise the futility of driving right and relying on their forward to receive a behind-the-back pass once they run into trouble. LeBron James slows down and begins to get fouled by opponents who, it seems, can’t stop suspecting that he’s up to something, that he’s planning to switch gears on them. Picks and rolls are set with increasing frequency, Scott Skiles and Miami head coach Erik Spoelstra each start to smile as their teams actually run the plays they practise five days a week, and both coaches begin to believe that they can pull out a win. As Spoelstra relaxes, he looks less like a suspect on CSI: Miami and more like an impossibly handsome forensic investigator. Skiles is stung with two technical fouls, one of which features him wandering onto the court and colliding with a Heat player just inside the three-point line, but he manages to avoid being ejected from the stadium. Thirty-seven games into the season, Miami reveals that it’s still a team of individuals, but without a 2004-era Pistons team in opposition, they’ll keep swarming the front-court and winning. Less a revelation than a continuation, then. We’re still watching, but Andrew Bogut still can’t catch a break. Maybe if he started jumping?
…
As I said, supra, strange things. Something to convince myself of the importance of biography and intent, rather than viewing the product-text as the only thing worthy of examination. Otherwise I’d simply valorise Miami, chalk one more up in the ‘W’ column and assume Spoelstra had planned the whole thing.
I think I could have used an annotated collection of American rap lyrics in 1998 or so, when I started listening to albums with parental advisory labels, as opposed to those featuring blurred black-and-white photography and typewriter-styled fonts. Not that there’s a lot of contextual information a nascent rap fan can’t pick up from repeated spins of anything in NWA’s opus, but Jay-Z’s Decoded looks set to fill a gap on my bookshelf I didn’t know I had. (And how could I have missed Kanye West’s Through the Wire: Lyrics & Illuminations? The mind, it boggles. Although I’m inherently suspicious of anything Kanye writes that isn’t written in full caps.)
Despite my necessary reliance on annotation I have retained what is, I think, a healthy suspicion of the practice’s end-products. (‘Healthy’ because I still regard annotation as one of the most noble pastimes of the academic, ‘suspicion’ because of that persistent gap between the author’s intention and the reader’s or listener’s interpretation.) E.D. Hirsch maintains, quite rightly I think, that “no interpretive method can be consistently appropriate to any narrow class of texts”, and the very concept of autonomism – the doctrine holding that literary texts belong to a distinct ontological realm where meaning is independent of authorial will – denies valid interpretation.
Quoting Hirsch again, at length: “To understand a poem by Keats a reader must imaginatively re-enact the doubts, glories, and mysteries which inform Keats’ sense of life, but afterwards the reader can subject his imaginative construction to a severe discipline which tests whether his supposed understanding of Keats was just an illusion; in interpretation the divinatory method can be followed by the critical. The divinatory moment is unmethodical, intuitive, sympathetic; it is an imaginative guess without which nothing can begin. The second, or critical moment of interpretation submits the first moment to a ‘high intellectual standard’ by testing it against all relevant knowledge available. Thus, although the critical moment is dependent and secondary, it has the indispensable function of raising interpretive guesses to the level of knowledge.” I wonder about the lack of emphasis on the divinatory moment in the oft-maligned Humanities, but a suggestion of anything less than Critical Discourse and Important Discoveries should probably be avoided, particularly when the university budget-setters start waving around those red pens.
It’s all much easier if the bearer of authorial will can interpret the text first; the divinatory and critical moments are slightly better informed. For this reason, it’s always more straightforward to analyse texts whose authors have written about the act of writing, musicians who have reviewed music, or rappers who can substantively criticise other wordsmiths without reference to the sheer number of rhetorical devices used. (See Evidence’s ‘freestyle’ with Eminem for a misbegotten example of this kind of lyrical crutch: “Verbs get flipped, it’s like this, yo acronyms and all that / Metaphor imagery, you claiming’ metaphors and spittin’ similes…”)
Jay-Z’s too politic for that level of criticism, as far as I know, but at very the least he’s prepared to step back and explain some of the doubts and glories behind his verses (which, it should be noted, aren’t typically written down and edited before he records them). Looking at the single available page from Decoded – the annotated lyrics of ‘American Dreamin” linked from the Wall Street Journal article on the book and Carter-as-equity-conscious-businessman – there’s just one note I hadn’t picked up on: “They say it’s celestial, it’s all in the stars / It’s like Tony La Russa / How you play your cards” appropriately enough refers to the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s not something I’d ever really wondered about – it’s easy enough to assume there’d be a link like that – but I’m more interested in the final annotation, ostensibly to the line “You could see from behind” that explains something more of the song that I’d expected.
According to Jay-Z,
This series – about seeing the signs, seeing the scheming jackers, seeing inside the minds of the cops so you know when they’re coming – is meant to show how impossible it is for anyone to have the level of vision you’d need to make the dream of the hustler really come true. There are too many threats, too many hazards; even the smartest, most discerning hustler can’t anticipate it all. This song is like the blues; it’s about the inevitable tragedy of the hustler’s life, the inevitable piercing of the hustler’s dream. It’s about a wish that can’t come true. Can it?
That’s the level of interpretation I wouldn’t mind seeing throughout the book; hopefully there’s a note like that for each of the annotated songs. You could argue, I suppose, that any piece of art that needs to be decoded isn’t as effective as it could be, but to me, the initial act of divination has always been half the point. It’s returning the author to his or her place of privilege; realising that even though a ‘reasonable reader’ can’t be expected to grok everything the first time through, the important point is that the author/artist was mindful enough to lay on enough meaning to sustain multiple readings – Sean Kingston’s sins against good taste notwithstanding, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if your iPod’s stuck on replay.
Speaking of replays, I probably think about Die Antwoord altogether too much – they’re my aural equivalent of a looped car-crash video filmed cinéma vérité style by one of Blomkamp’s Prawns – but I’m glad they (via bb) glossed the lyrics to ‘Evil Boy‘, which on first listen sounds like a terribly emphatic homophobic rant. There’s a lot of divination to be had here (if they’re the answer, then what the fuck was the question?), particularly when you’re faced with the trappings of a gangster worn in not-quite-completely tongue-in-cheek fashion. I wouldn’t getting one of those prosthetic Prawn arms in time for Halloween, though.
Image: Yolandi Visser, photo by Kobus Holnaaier.
