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Morton Feldman

5/19/2013

Morton Feldman’s remark about the moment in his work when form becomes scale echoes Elaine de Kooning’s remark that Rothko’s work does not inhabit shapes but areas.

'The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others. The compositional concentration is solely on which pattern should be reiterated and for how long ...'

'In that sense, my compositions are not 'compositions' at all. One might call them time canvases in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of music. I have learned that the more one composes or constructs the more one prevents Time Undisturbed from becoming the controlling metaphor of the music.'

Feldman said his idea was not to ‘compose’, but to project sounds into time, free from compositional rhetoric. ‘I find that as the piece gets longer, there has to be less material. That the piece itself, strangely enough, cannot take it. It has nothing to do with my patience … I don’t have an anxiety that I’ve got to stop. But there’s less going into it, so I think the piece dies a natural death. It dies of old age.’

In his ultralong works of the 1980s, Feldman moulded repetition, sonority and memory on a timescale so large as to overpower the listener’s frame of reference. ‘My music sounds like Webern, except longer. But I didn’t get the idea conceptually from music at all. I got the idea from ‘Teppich’ rugs … one of the most interesting things about a beautiful old rug in natural vegetable dyes is that it has ‘abrash’, which is that you dye in small quantities. You cannot dye in big bulks of wool. So it’s the same, yet it’s not the same. It has a kind of micro-tonal hue. So when you look at it, it has that kind of marvellous shimmer which is that slight gradation.’

It is impossible not to mention Turkish rugs when writing about Feldman's late music, especially with regard to the visual aspect of his scores. Ex.8 and Ex.9 are visual renditions of the piano and string quartet parts respectively of Piano and string quartet (1985).

(Images courtesy Frank Sani)

Jacqueline Rose on Marcel Proust

2/10/2013

Proust both coveted and despised the society in which he lived.
À la recherche du temps perdu is a 'feminist Gothic horror story'.
The scene in which Vinteuil's daughter commits an act of Sadeism by spitting on a photograph of her parents sets up the whole novel.
No one does primal scenes quite like Proust...
The hypocricy, social fussiness, dizzy ascent and subsequent precipitous decline are all symptoms of social upheaval.
After attending Zola's trial, Proust asked himself how to introduce history and social justice into À la recherche du temps perdu without destroying it.
Proust was a total snob, but his book is an analysis of snobbery.
Proust's mother was Jewish but he was baptized as a Catholic.
The 'intermittencies of the heart' section of Volume Four: Sodom and Gomorrah is the greatest ever piece of writing on grief.

Max Sebald's Writing Tips

1/14/2013

"W.G. Sebald taught his final fiction workshop at the University of East Anglia during the autumn of 2001. In the literary world he was rapidly gaining renown: there had been the succès d’estime of his first three books, and then the publication of Austerlitz earlier that year. In the classroom—where David Lambert and I were two of sixteen students—Sebald was unassuming, almost shy, and asked that we call him Max. When discussing students’ work he was anecdotal and associative, more storyteller than technician. He had weary eyes that made it tempting to identify him with the melancholy narrators of his books, but he also had a gentle amiability and wry sense of humour. We were in his thrall. He died three days after the final class.

As far as I’m aware, nobody that term recorded Max’s words systematically. However, in the wake of his death, David and I found ourselves returning to our notes, where we’d written down many of Max’s remarks. These we gleaned and shared with our classmates. Still, I wish we’d been more diligent, more complete. The comments recorded here represent only a small portion of Max’s contribution to the class."

David Lambert & Robert McGill

On Approach

Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality.
Writing is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.
By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.
Expressionism was really a kind of willful avant-gardism after the First World War, an attempt to wrench language into a form it does not normally have. It must have purpose, though. It hasn’t really occurred in English but is very common in German.
Write about obscure things but don’t write obscurely.
There is a certain merit in leaving some parts of your writing obscure.
It’s hard to write something original about Napoleon, but one of his minor aides is another matter.

On Narration and Structure

In the nineteenth century the omniscient author was God: totalitarian and monolithic. The twentieth century, with all its horrors, was more demotic. It took in people’s accounts; suddenly there were other views. In the natural sciences the [twentieth] century saw the disproving of Newton and the introduction of the notion of relativity.
In the twentieth century we know that the observer always affects what is being observed. So, writing biography now, you have to talk about where you got your sources, how it was talking to that woman in Beverly Hills, the trouble you had at the airport.
Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
The present tense lends itself to comedy. The past is foregone and naturally melancholic.
There is a species of narrator, the chronicler; he’s dispassionate, he’s seen it all.
You can’t attribute a shortcoming in a text to the state a character is in. For example, ‘he doesn’t know the landscape so he can’t describe it’ ,‘he’s drunk so he can’t know this or that’.

On Description

You need to set things very thoroughly in time and place unless you have good reasons [not to]. Young authors are often too worried about getting things moving on the rails, and not worried enough about what’s on either side of the tracks.
A sense of place distinguishes a piece of writing. It may be a distillation of different places. There must be a very good reason for not describing place.
Meteorology is not superfluous to the story. Don’t have an aversion to noticing the weather.
It’s very difficult, not to say impossible, to get physical movement right when writing. The important thing is that it should work for the reader, even if it is not accurate. You can use ellipsis, abbreviate a sequence of actions; you needn’t laboriously describe each one.
You sometimes need to magnify something, describe it amply in a roundabout way. And in the process you discover something.
How do you surpass horror once you’ve reached a certain level? How do you stop appearing gratuitous? Horror must be absolved by the quality of the prose.

On Detail

‘Significant detail’ enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation.
Oddities are interesting.
Characters need details that will anchor themselves in your mind.
The use of twins or triplets who are virtually indistinguishable from each other can lend a spooky, uncanny edge. Kafka does it.
It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not perhaps trust ‘facts’ in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.
Exaggeration is the stuff of comedy.
It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognized pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies. Unlike in the urban setting, there, mental affliction goes unrecognized.
Dialect makes normal words seem other, odd and jagged. For example, ‘Jeziz’ for Jesus.
Particular disciplines have specialized terminology that is its own language. I could translate a page of Ian McEwan in half an hour—but golf equipment! another matter. Two Sainsbury’s managers talking to each other are a different species altogether.

On Reading and Intertextuality

Read books that have nothing to do with literature.
Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.
There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.
You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.
None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.
I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.
Don’t be afraid to bring in strange, eloquent quotations and graft them into your story. It enriches the prose. Quotations are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.
Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.
It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.
A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.
If you look carefully you can find problems in all writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.

On Style

Every sentence taken by itself should mean something.
Writing should not create the impression that the writer is trying to be ‘poetic’.
It’s easy to write rhythmical prose. It carries you along. After a while it gets tedious.
Long sentences prevent you from having continually to name the subject (‘Gertie did this, Gertie felt that’ etc.).
Avoid sentences that serve only to set up later sentences.
Use the word ‘and’ as little as possible. Try for variety in conjunctions.

On Revision

Don’t revise too much or it turns into patchwork.
Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.
Don’t listen to anyone. Not us, either. It’s fatal.

This article first appeared in Five Dials #5 magazine.

Susan Sontag on Walter Benjamin's 'One-Way Street'

1/6/2013

In general

- He was what the French call un triste. (p.8)

- One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But one can use the work to interpret the life. (p.9)

- Once, waiting for someone in the Café des Deux Magots in Paris, he managed to draw a diagram of his life: it was like a labyrinth, in which each important relationship figures as “an entrance to the maze”. (p.10)

- The self is a text—it has to be deciphered … The self is a project, something to be built. And the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears of oneself. (p.14)

- Precisely because he saw that “all human knowledge takes the form of interpretation”, he understood the importance of being against interpretation wherever it is obvious. (p.18)

- The need to be solitary—along with bitterness over one’s loneliness—is characteristic of the melancholic. To get work done, one must be solitary—or, at least, not bound to any permanent relationship. Benjamin’s negative feelings about marriage are clear in the essay on Goethe’s 'Elective Affinities'. His heroes—Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Kraus—never married; and Scholem reports that Benjamin came to regard his own marriage (he was married in 1917, estranged from his wife after 1921, and divorced in 1930) “as fatal to himself”. (p.23)

The idea of the flâneur

- The street, the passage, the arcade, the labyrinth are recurrent themes in his literary essays… (p.9)

- “Not to find one’s way about in a city is of little interest … But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires practice…” (p.10)

- The recurrent metaphors of maps and diagrams, memories and dreams, labyrinths and arcades, vistas and panoramas, evoke a certain vision of cities as well as a certain kind of life. Paris, Benjamin writes, “taught me the art of straying”. (p.10)

The influence of Saturn

- “I came into the world under the sign of Saturn—the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays…” (p.8)

- The influence of Saturn makes people “apathetic, indecisive, slow” … Slowness is one characteristic of the melancholic temperament. Blundering is another, from noticing too many possibilities, from not noticing one’s lack of practical sense.” (p.11)

The role of memory, time & space

- Benjamin could write about himself more directly when he started from memories, not contemporary experiences… (p.12)

- Benjamin regards everything he chooses to recall in his past as prophetic of the future, because the work of memory (reading oneself backward, he called it) collapses time. There is no chronological ordering of his reminiscences, for which he disavows the name of autobiography, because time is irrelevant. (“Autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life,” he writes in 'Berlin Chronicle'. “Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities.”) (p.12)

- Memory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux. Benjamin is not trying to recover his past, but to understand it: to condense it into its spatial forms, its premonitory structures. (p.13)

- For the character born under the sign of Saturn, time is the medium of constraint, inadequacy, repetition, mere fulfilment. In time, one is only what one is: what one has always been. In space, one can be another person … Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow funnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities indeed. (p.13)

The idea of the miniature

- Much of the originality of Benjamin’s arguments owes to his microscopic gaze … “It was the small things that attracted him most”, writes Scholem. He loved old toys, postage stamps, picture postcards, and such playful miniaturizations of reality as the winter world inside a glass globe that snows when it is shaken. His own handwriting was almost microscopic… (p.19)

- To miniaturize is to make portable—the ideal form of possessing things for a wanderer, or a refugee. Benjamin, of course, was both a wanderer, on the move, and a collector, weighed down by things … To miniaturize is to conceal. Benjamin was drawn to the extremely small … To miniaturize means to make useless. For what is so grotesquely reduced is, in a sense, liberated from its meaning—its tininess being the outstanding thing about it. It is both a whole (that is, complete) and a fragment (so tiny, the wrong scale). It becomes an object of disinterested contemplation or reverie. (p.20)

On style

- His characteristic form remained the essay. The melancholic’s intensity and exhaustiveness of attention set natural limits to the length at which Benjamin could explicate his ideas. His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct ... His sentences do not seem to be generated in the usual way; they do not entail. Each sentence is written as if it were the first, or the last … His style of thinking and writing, incorrectly called aphoristic, might better be called freeze-frame baroque. (p.24)

Notes on 'Patience (After Sebald)'

12/5/2012

Rings of Saturn is “irradiated by melancholy.” Adam Phillips
Silk—motif threaded through Rings of Saturn.
Is Rings of Saturn like a cross between Woolf’s The Waves and Tarkovsky’s Stalker? Katie Mitchell
"He's a biographer who walks his subjects back into life or maybe he walks forwards after them into death—it's never quite clear." Robert McFarlane
Sebald deals with dust, ash, spume, cloud, vapour—substances that have been reduced down and down until they are in a state between being and nothingness... Robert McFarlane
“The walker’s approach to nature is a phenomenological one.” WG Sebald
"In the traditional of the 'melancolic', it is as though these people feel an inexplicable sense of loss. The feeling is somehow that there is some catastrophe that can't be located and that one is living in the aftermath of that catastrophe." Adam Phillips
UK tradition of walking is one of recovery; US tradition is one of discovery. Robert McFarlane
"East is the direction of lost causes." WG Sebald
Mazes as cross-sections of a brain.
Quincunx—5-point pattern repeated throughout Rings of Saturn is found everywhere in nature—a cabbalistic, pre-modern way of seeing pattern in the world. Uncanny connections.
"The section in Nabokov's Transparent Things about how, when you concentrate on a material object, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntary sinking into its surface. Nabokov uses the beautiful phrase 'the dream life of debris'. This happens again and again in Sebald's work—what begins as a particular object that is seen in all its specificity slowly becomes and kind of quicksand that sucks the gaze of the viewer and the footfall of the walker down into it and we find ourselves at Bergen-Belsen or in the Congo." Robert McFarlane
“Coincidence is like dreams—if you talk about them, they become dead. The only thing you can do with dreams is transmute them, which is exactly what Sebald does." Tacita Dean
"Poetic cul-de-sacs." Tacita Dean
"I assume that Sebald must have known Freud's essay on the Uncanny. Freud says something simple in the essay which is that, when we have what we think of as an 'uncanny' experience, it actually is a recovery of an experience that was once familiar and then had to be estranged in some way, so that if I go somewhere and have a déjà vu, or I feel something 'uncanny' is happening to me, it's because unknown to myself, I'm having a memory of an earlier experience that was probably pleasurable but that I had to in some way disown. The most 'uncanny' place is one's home, as in it appears to be the most familiar place but actually it's the most unfamiliar place." Adam Phillips
“Undertow of despair."

Forward>>

Morton Feldman

Jacqueline Rose on Marcel Proust

Max Sebald's Writing Tips

Susan Sontag on Walter Benjamin's 'One-Way Street'

Notes on 'Patience (After Sebald)'

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