Here I have written little explanations for why these are my favourite authors.
J. G. Ballard - He dissects our culture with a perfect scientist's-eye precision. He ilogically uses logic to make 2 + 2 make 5 in an incredibly perverse, deviant manner. He constantly builds an equilibrium between waking life and dreams, and, as a consequence of this, unveils the hidden mechanisms of the human mind.
William Faulkner - He vigorously attacks subject matter from all angles at once. His novels are an intricate maze where time is fractured, making the second and third and fourth reading vital in order to shed light on what preceded the final chapters. He employs a masterful use of the stream of consciousness technique in order to understand the human condition which is in a state of deterioration in the south of the USA.
Paul Auster - A storyteller of supreme originality and unprecedented power. His most predominant theme is that of arbitrary and co-incidental events. All his characters are seekers who are looking for some sort of truth who are caught up amidst these 'arbitrary' events. Auster fuses these metaphysical and existential issues with the metric pace of crime thrillers to put this across. As a critic somewhere said, he is 'an experimental writer who is also compulsively readable.'
Jorge Luis Borges - His work is endlessly re-readable: his short-stories can be read again and again with the exact same feeling of sheer amazement. He renovated language, and introduced a way of thinking that had never been conjured up before. He read everything, so he consequently took all his literary knowledge for an intellectual game-play that modified the past. His main themes are labyrinths and infinity, and he interjects his themes into a number of settings: fictional essays, realism, fantasy, parables, poems,etc.
Juan Rulfo - He makes you feel the poverty and wretched hopelessness of rural Mexico in the first half of 20th century. He gets this done extremely well with either an incredibly simplistic approach or an incredibly complex approach. He employs a linear narrative in the short story collection The Burning Plain but, like Faulkner, in Pedro Páramo he makes time fractured as all the action is set in a ghost town, which ultimately means that there is no discernible beginning or end because the characters are dead and no longer have a sense of time. I urge you to read him if you enjoyed Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Julio Cortázar - He replicates the games we all played in childhood with a forthright use of humour. He consequently implements themes taken from childhood into the kind of intellectual game-play set out by Borges, but shrouds it with a deceptively 'realist' setting. These fantastic elements are concealed enigmatically until they finally erupt out of its self-imposed constraints, and have a characteristic which is rare in the short story form (the form which he mastered the most): they seem to question the reader, and seek to involve him/her in the narrative.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - His novels are absolutely engrossing right from the very beginning to the very end. He was the precursor to 20th century literature; he was the person who established all the themes that were to be developed by the leading existential thinkers; he was ahead of his time. All the novels I've read by him have imprinted an awe in me, and this sensation of amazement has lingered unsettlingly in the back of my mind.
Thomas Pynchon - He attempts to cramp the most disparate of elements into a very large container. He's a post-modernist James Joyce who apologetically and violently and abrasively experiments with form. He branches out to many non-literary themes - physics, mathematics, pornography - to achieve an encyclopedic scope and range. His novels are allegedly 'overwritten', but this ambition results in an incredibly rewarding read which is unprecedented by any writer having preceded him
Juan Carlos Onetti - Passionately unpassionate. I can completely relate with his laziness and his indifference to the rest of the world. I can also relate with his way of looking at 'the other side of things'. He created an imaginary realm called 'Santa Maria' where he intermingled fantasy and reality thus creating 'magic realism'. All his protagonists are anti-heroes, and they are lazy and hopeless cases: people like me.
Friday, 14 November 2008
Monday, 1 September 2008
Julio Cortázar and the terrorist novel
I didn't invent the term 'terrorist novel'. I heard it used by J. G. Ballard in this excellent documentary which can be watched here.
While I'd say that Julio Cortazár's best writing can be found in his perfect short stories, he proved himself to be among the most original and ground-breaking novelists emerging from the latin-american literary boom of the '60s and '70s. He wrote 4 novels where he vigorously experimented and kept re-inventing his style. Each of his novels created furores amongst the latin-american literary establishment; each of his novels were terrorist bombs designed to re-define and broaden the horizons and possibilities of this literary medium.
Hopscotch (known in spanish as Rayuela) transgresses the literary conventions of the novel by giving the reader an option. This means that the reader's contribution is not passive as he/she is taking decisions on the direction the book takes in the same way that the writer took decisions when he wrote it. The open-ended structure leads to either a linear or non-linear reading of the book. You can either hopscotch your way through it or you can read it from beginning to end. One of the controversies Cortázar created with this book was how he infuriated feminists by calling the passive reader el lector hembra (the effeminate reader). Ultimately, this book was a terrorist novel in the way it questioned the role of the reader and its attempt to cramp as much as it possibly could into the smallest container.
62: A Model Kit disappointed many readers as it did not turn out to be a second part of Rayuela, but instead proposed an entirely new way of approaching the novel as a genre. This time Cortázar gives absolutely no instructions of how to approach the book: everything is up to the reader. The book this time follows another group of intellectuals in various european cities but, unlike Rayuela, is pessimistic in its tone as there's not the faintest trace of hope on 'the other side of the wall'. Its abrasive experimentalism turned out to be a huge failure in terms of sales, and its critics and its audience were completely perplexed by it.
Cortázar's final novel, El Libro De Manuel (which I've yet to read), caused a giant furore by upsetting both the left-wing and right-wing communities of latin-america. It was Cortázar's first political work, and it's also where he first made explicit his recent relationship with socialism and communism. The right-wingers were upset as it didn't correspond with their ideological views and opinions. Meanwhile the left-wingers found it morally wrong to write a book about the political prisoners of Argentina.
If you've yet to read this excellent writer who is not very well-known in either Europe or the USA, I suggest that you purchase the wonderful short-story collection Blow-up. They are so good, in my opinion, that they are to be put beside Poe and Borges.
While I'd say that Julio Cortazár's best writing can be found in his perfect short stories, he proved himself to be among the most original and ground-breaking novelists emerging from the latin-american literary boom of the '60s and '70s. He wrote 4 novels where he vigorously experimented and kept re-inventing his style. Each of his novels created furores amongst the latin-american literary establishment; each of his novels were terrorist bombs designed to re-define and broaden the horizons and possibilities of this literary medium.
Hopscotch (known in spanish as Rayuela) transgresses the literary conventions of the novel by giving the reader an option. This means that the reader's contribution is not passive as he/she is taking decisions on the direction the book takes in the same way that the writer took decisions when he wrote it. The open-ended structure leads to either a linear or non-linear reading of the book. You can either hopscotch your way through it or you can read it from beginning to end. One of the controversies Cortázar created with this book was how he infuriated feminists by calling the passive reader el lector hembra (the effeminate reader). Ultimately, this book was a terrorist novel in the way it questioned the role of the reader and its attempt to cramp as much as it possibly could into the smallest container.
62: A Model Kit disappointed many readers as it did not turn out to be a second part of Rayuela, but instead proposed an entirely new way of approaching the novel as a genre. This time Cortázar gives absolutely no instructions of how to approach the book: everything is up to the reader. The book this time follows another group of intellectuals in various european cities but, unlike Rayuela, is pessimistic in its tone as there's not the faintest trace of hope on 'the other side of the wall'. Its abrasive experimentalism turned out to be a huge failure in terms of sales, and its critics and its audience were completely perplexed by it.
Cortázar's final novel, El Libro De Manuel (which I've yet to read), caused a giant furore by upsetting both the left-wing and right-wing communities of latin-america. It was Cortázar's first political work, and it's also where he first made explicit his recent relationship with socialism and communism. The right-wingers were upset as it didn't correspond with their ideological views and opinions. Meanwhile the left-wingers found it morally wrong to write a book about the political prisoners of Argentina.
If you've yet to read this excellent writer who is not very well-known in either Europe or the USA, I suggest that you purchase the wonderful short-story collection Blow-up. They are so good, in my opinion, that they are to be put beside Poe and Borges.
Monday, 21 July 2008
YET ANOTHER DUMB FUCKING LIST
I'm incapable of writing those interesting minature essays I used to make. So here you have yet another list. I'm a pathetic, philistine moron that should die.
TOP 10 CLASSICAL PIECES LIST
10. Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten - Arvo Part
9. Symphony of Wind Instruments - Igor Stravinsky
8. Symphonie Fantastique - Hector Berlioz
7. Tzigane - Maurice Ravel
6. Piano Concerto No. 3 - Sergei Rachmaninov
5. Turangalila - Olivier Messiaen
4. Clocks and Clouds - Gyorgy Ligeti
3. La Mer - Claude Debussy
2. Rite of Spring - Igor Stravinsky
1. String Quartet No. 4 - Bela Bartok
TOP 10 CLASSICAL PIECES LIST
10. Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten - Arvo Part
9. Symphony of Wind Instruments - Igor Stravinsky
8. Symphonie Fantastique - Hector Berlioz
7. Tzigane - Maurice Ravel
6. Piano Concerto No. 3 - Sergei Rachmaninov
5. Turangalila - Olivier Messiaen
4. Clocks and Clouds - Gyorgy Ligeti
3. La Mer - Claude Debussy
2. Rite of Spring - Igor Stravinsky
1. String Quartet No. 4 - Bela Bartok
Thursday, 10 July 2008
Top 10 popular music CDs
10. Frank Zappa - The Grand Wazoo
9. Ornette Coleman - Free Jazz
8. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
7. Eric Dolphy - Out To Lunch
6. Kayo Dot - Choirs of the Eye
5. Otomo Yoshihide - Dreams
4. The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour
3. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica
2. Miles Davis - In A Silent Way
1. Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
5 random extracts
Here are 5 extracts outta books by the writers I chose for my 'TOP 5 WRITERS ACCORDING TO SIMON KING' list. I skimmed through the books recently, and the paragraphs selected are what most impressed me at the time. They are not, however, the definite 'best' or my 'favourite' examples of the authors' writing.
---------------
Extract from the novel Moon Palace by Paul Auster
I stood on the beach for a long time, waiting for the last bits of sunshine to vanish. Behind me, the town went about its business, making familiar late-century American noises. As I looked down the curve of the coast, I saw the lights of the houses being turned on, one by one. Then the moon came up from behind the hills. It was a full moon, as round and yellow as a burning stone. I kept my eyes on it as it rose into the night sky, not turning away until it had found its place in the darkness.
Chapter 7 of the novel Hopscotch (Rayuela) by Julio Cortázar
Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elije y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano en tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.
Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez más cerca y entonces jugamos al cíclope, nos miramos cada vez más de cerca y los ojos se agrandan, se acercan entre si, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, modiéndose con los labios apoyando apenas la lengua en los dientes, jugando en sus recintos donde un aire pesado va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de movimientos vivos, de fragrancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa instántanea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mi como una luna en el agua.
Extract from the novel The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
It was a while before the last stroke ceased vibrating. It stayed in the air, more felt than heard, for a long time. Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays and Jesus and Saint Francis talking about his sister. Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it. Finished. If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest i said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames And where he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn't. That's why I didn't. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he saud, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It's not when you realize that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realize that you don't need any aid. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived. One minute she was standing in the door.
Extract from a short story entitled 'The Aleph' (El Aleph) by Jorge Luis Borges
En la parte inferior del escalón, hacia la derecha, vi una pequeña esfera tornasolada, de casi intolerable fulgor. Al prinicipio la creí giratoria; luego comprendí que ese movimiento era una ilusión producida por los vertginosos espectáculos que encerraba. El diámetro del Aleph sería de dos o tres centímetros, pero el espacio cósmico estaba ahí, sin disminución de tamaño. Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo. Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta años vi en el zaguán de una casa en Fray Bentos, vi racimos, nieve tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidaré, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cáncer en el pecho, vi un círculo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un árbol, vi una quinta de Adrogué, un ejemplar de la primera versión inglesa de Plinio, la de Philemon Holland, vi a un tiempo cada letra de cada página (de chico, yo solía maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaren y perdieran en el decurso de la noche), vi la noche y el día contemporáneo, vi un poniente en Querétano que parecia reflejar el color de una rosa en Bengala, vi mi dormitorio sin nadie, vi un gabinete de Alkmaar un globo terráqueo entre dos espejos que lo multiplicaban sin fin, vi caballos de crin arremolinada, en una playa del Mar Caspio en el alba, vi la delicada osatura de una mano, vi a los sobrevivientes de una batalla, enviando tarjetas postales, vi en un escaparate de Mirzapur una baraja española, vi las sombras oblicuas de unos helechos en el suelo de un invernáculo, vi tigres, émbolos, bisontes, marejadas y ejércitos, vi todas las hormigas que hay en la tierra, vi un astrolabio persa, vi en un cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increíbles, precisas, que Beatriz había dirigido a Carlos Argentino, vi un adorado monumento en la Chacarita, vi la reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente había sido Beatriz Viterbo, vi la circulación de mi oscura sangre, vi el engranje del amor y la modificación de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, vi my cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vertigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.
Extract from the novel Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping molls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world...
---------------
Extract from the novel Moon Palace by Paul Auster
I stood on the beach for a long time, waiting for the last bits of sunshine to vanish. Behind me, the town went about its business, making familiar late-century American noises. As I looked down the curve of the coast, I saw the lights of the houses being turned on, one by one. Then the moon came up from behind the hills. It was a full moon, as round and yellow as a burning stone. I kept my eyes on it as it rose into the night sky, not turning away until it had found its place in the darkness.
Chapter 7 of the novel Hopscotch (Rayuela) by Julio Cortázar
Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elije y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano en tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.
Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez más cerca y entonces jugamos al cíclope, nos miramos cada vez más de cerca y los ojos se agrandan, se acercan entre si, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, modiéndose con los labios apoyando apenas la lengua en los dientes, jugando en sus recintos donde un aire pesado va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de movimientos vivos, de fragrancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa instántanea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mi como una luna en el agua.
Extract from the novel The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
It was a while before the last stroke ceased vibrating. It stayed in the air, more felt than heard, for a long time. Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays and Jesus and Saint Francis talking about his sister. Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it. Finished. If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest i said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames And where he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn't. That's why I didn't. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he saud, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It's not when you realize that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realize that you don't need any aid. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived. One minute she was standing in the door.
Extract from a short story entitled 'The Aleph' (El Aleph) by Jorge Luis Borges
En la parte inferior del escalón, hacia la derecha, vi una pequeña esfera tornasolada, de casi intolerable fulgor. Al prinicipio la creí giratoria; luego comprendí que ese movimiento era una ilusión producida por los vertginosos espectáculos que encerraba. El diámetro del Aleph sería de dos o tres centímetros, pero el espacio cósmico estaba ahí, sin disminución de tamaño. Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo. Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta años vi en el zaguán de una casa en Fray Bentos, vi racimos, nieve tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidaré, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cáncer en el pecho, vi un círculo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un árbol, vi una quinta de Adrogué, un ejemplar de la primera versión inglesa de Plinio, la de Philemon Holland, vi a un tiempo cada letra de cada página (de chico, yo solía maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaren y perdieran en el decurso de la noche), vi la noche y el día contemporáneo, vi un poniente en Querétano que parecia reflejar el color de una rosa en Bengala, vi mi dormitorio sin nadie, vi un gabinete de Alkmaar un globo terráqueo entre dos espejos que lo multiplicaban sin fin, vi caballos de crin arremolinada, en una playa del Mar Caspio en el alba, vi la delicada osatura de una mano, vi a los sobrevivientes de una batalla, enviando tarjetas postales, vi en un escaparate de Mirzapur una baraja española, vi las sombras oblicuas de unos helechos en el suelo de un invernáculo, vi tigres, émbolos, bisontes, marejadas y ejércitos, vi todas las hormigas que hay en la tierra, vi un astrolabio persa, vi en un cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increíbles, precisas, que Beatriz había dirigido a Carlos Argentino, vi un adorado monumento en la Chacarita, vi la reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente había sido Beatriz Viterbo, vi la circulación de mi oscura sangre, vi el engranje del amor y la modificación de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, vi my cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vertigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.
Extract from the novel Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard
The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping molls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world...
Sunday, 6 July 2008
I've got no outpourings left....
I've regressed into a boring fucking cunt: I can't write; I can't dream; I can't read. I am the antithesis of what my former-self used to embody. It is a great irony how in my short story 'The Pills', the character can only write with the medication. In 'real life', the 'pills' I'm taking prevent me from writing. I wish I wasn't such a lazy cunt; I lack discipline and craft. When I first started my blog I wrote really interesting, miniature essays. I am no longer capable of doing that now..... I've got no more outpourings left. I'm in a constant state of languidity.
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
10 Death metal albums that rock
A healthy, liberating form of music.
1. Napalm Death - Scum
2. Decapitated - Nihilty
3. Opeth - Deliverance
4. Cannibal Corpse - Bloodthirst
5. Brutal Truth - Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses
6. Meshuggah - Nothing
7. Isis - Oceanic
8. Nile - In The Beginning
9. Gorguts - Erosion of Sanity
10. Godflesh - Merciless
Currently listening to John Fahey's 'America'.
1. Napalm Death - Scum
2. Decapitated - Nihilty
3. Opeth - Deliverance
4. Cannibal Corpse - Bloodthirst
5. Brutal Truth - Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses
6. Meshuggah - Nothing
7. Isis - Oceanic
8. Nile - In The Beginning
9. Gorguts - Erosion of Sanity
10. Godflesh - Merciless
Currently listening to John Fahey's 'America'.
Thursday, 19 June 2008
PROMOTING MY MSN
simoncangas@hotmail.com
I desperately want to talk to more interesting people who share the same interests as me (people with a strong interest for the dense and the abrasive) since about 95% of my MSN contacts are boring fucking cunts.
I would like to talk about dreams and the unconscious, the remote edges, modern classical music, modernist literature, the moon, free jazz, death metal, latin-american literature, my own writing, masturbation and Chilean football. I'm getting lonely and I crave appreciation.
There also seems to be a whole generation of reclusive, misanthropic teenagers creating strange art. I would like to meet more of these people in order to create a literary and musical revolution in the future. We should all break with convention, and we should all make the mainstream more exciting (let's get Bartok on the radio and let's make experimental, abrasive novels bestsellers). We should adopt the name of 'the internet generation'.
SO ADD ME NOW.
I desperately want to talk to more interesting people who share the same interests as me (people with a strong interest for the dense and the abrasive) since about 95% of my MSN contacts are boring fucking cunts.
I would like to talk about dreams and the unconscious, the remote edges, modern classical music, modernist literature, the moon, free jazz, death metal, latin-american literature, my own writing, masturbation and Chilean football. I'm getting lonely and I crave appreciation.
There also seems to be a whole generation of reclusive, misanthropic teenagers creating strange art. I would like to meet more of these people in order to create a literary and musical revolution in the future. We should all break with convention, and we should all make the mainstream more exciting (let's get Bartok on the radio and let's make experimental, abrasive novels bestsellers). We should adopt the name of 'the internet generation'.
SO ADD ME NOW.
Saturday, 14 June 2008
My favourite moments in cinematic history
The ending in Barton Fink.
The intermission in 2001 when Kubrick plugs Ligeti to a wide audience, shrouding it all in utter darkness; I love Ligeti in darkness, too.
The ending in 2001 - unsurpassable.
The end of A Clockwork Orange when Alex slooshies lovely, lovely Beethoven... 'I was cured, all right.'
Any scene in The Big Lebowski.
'Springtime for Hitler' performed in the original version of The Producers.
The first episode in The Second Heimat.
The ending in Brazil.
The ending in Eraserhead.
The moment when the kid finds the ear in Blue Velvet.
The intermission in 2001 when Kubrick plugs Ligeti to a wide audience, shrouding it all in utter darkness; I love Ligeti in darkness, too.
The ending in 2001 - unsurpassable.
The end of A Clockwork Orange when Alex slooshies lovely, lovely Beethoven... 'I was cured, all right.'
Any scene in The Big Lebowski.
'Springtime for Hitler' performed in the original version of The Producers.
The first episode in The Second Heimat.
The ending in Brazil.
The ending in Eraserhead.
The moment when the kid finds the ear in Blue Velvet.
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
Some of my heroes
Mark E. Smith - lead singer for british group The Fall.Magnum opus: The Fall's 1983 album Hex Enduction Hour.
Julio Cortázar - Argentinian author of short stories and experimental novels.Magnum opus: the novel Hopscotch which was published in 1963.
Jorge Luis Borges - world-renown author of short stories and man of wisdom.
Magnum opus: the short story The Aleph
Frank Zappa - prolific rock composer, polymath and social commentator.Magnum opus: the 1972 album The Grand Wazoo
Don Van Vliet - idiosyncratic rock performer and expressionist painter.Magnum opus: 1969's Trout Mask Replica
Juan Carlos Onetti - Uruguayan novelist who preceded the latin-american 'boom' and was one of the creators of 'magic realism'.
Magnum opus: the novel A Brief Life
Igor Stravinsky - 20th century's most important composer who vigorously reshaped the way we perceive music.Magnum opus: the 1913 ballet entitled The Rite of Spring
Coen Brothers - Hollywood film-makers who have created numerous post-modern, oddball movies.Magnum opus: Barton Fink
Harry Partch - Outsider and hobo who created incredibly imaginative and ethnically diverse musical compositions.
Magnum opus: Delusion of the Fury
J. G. Ballard - A maverick English novelist and short story writer who juxtaposes science fiction with surrealism and Freudian psychology.Magnum opus: The Unlimited Dream Company
Paul Auster - American writer whose novels deal with arbitary and coincidental events.
Magnum opus: the novella City of Glass
Saturday, 7 June 2008
My future oeuvre
See-Saw - An experimental novel which switches in and out from descriptions of the present tense (titled '1' - see) to descriptions of the past tense (titled '2' - saw). The character will be a seeker who strives for an identity, and who is on the fringes of society.
Dream Stairs - A novel which shall follow 'dream logic'; it will be a collection of bizarre, picaresque adventures which will blur any discernible distinction between fantasy and reality. The protagonist will have lost contact with reality, and the novel continues to detoriate as his mind does.
X1 - A collection of short stories written between 2010 and 2015 which shall hopefully be accompanied with illustrations made by some artist I shall encounter in the distant future.
Teenage Ruminations - A collection of short stories written between 2007 and 2009.
Psychotic Hallucinations - A companion piece for 'Dream Stairs' which will also be a sequel of sorts. The novel will have another new character who loses contact with reality, and whose adventures are delusional beliefs occuring inside his own mind. Unlike 'Dream Stairs', however, this novel will solely take place in waking life.
Strandenforp - A collection of short stories which shall all take place in the fictional town of 'Strandenforp'.
Dream Stairs - A novel which shall follow 'dream logic'; it will be a collection of bizarre, picaresque adventures which will blur any discernible distinction between fantasy and reality. The protagonist will have lost contact with reality, and the novel continues to detoriate as his mind does.
X1 - A collection of short stories written between 2010 and 2015 which shall hopefully be accompanied with illustrations made by some artist I shall encounter in the distant future.
Teenage Ruminations - A collection of short stories written between 2007 and 2009.
Psychotic Hallucinations - A companion piece for 'Dream Stairs' which will also be a sequel of sorts. The novel will have another new character who loses contact with reality, and whose adventures are delusional beliefs occuring inside his own mind. Unlike 'Dream Stairs', however, this novel will solely take place in waking life.
Strandenforp - A collection of short stories which shall all take place in the fictional town of 'Strandenforp'.
I turned 18 today!
I'm an 18-year-old man.
And I like it.
I'm an 18-year-old man.
What are you gonna do about it?
BIRTHDAY GIFTS I GOT:
A special lamp for reading
The rough guide to classical music (book)
No Country For Old Men DVD
Lots of chocolate
Comfortable jumper
Comfortable trousers
Los Siete Locos - Roberto Arlt (book)
Los Lanzallamas - Roberto Arlt (book)
Ear plugs
Spanish dictionary
I can also watch porn legally now.
And I like it.
I'm an 18-year-old man.
What are you gonna do about it?
BIRTHDAY GIFTS I GOT:
A special lamp for reading
The rough guide to classical music (book)
No Country For Old Men DVD
Lots of chocolate
Comfortable jumper
Comfortable trousers
Los Siete Locos - Roberto Arlt (book)
Los Lanzallamas - Roberto Arlt (book)
Ear plugs
Spanish dictionary
I can also watch porn legally now.
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
My 5 best stories
5. The Pills
I relied on the pills. I don't know what they're called, but they charge my emotions and inspire me. I had writer's block for four years, and these small things boosted my creativity; I wrote five novels in one year. But the pills turned me into a dangerously introverted individual. I detached myself from reality and retreated to the world of dreams, surrealist paintings which were hung all over my walls, and the pianola which played modern music throughout every single hour of every single day. I also experienced hallucinations: I saw blue devils, dead children and golden parrots. The press regarded me as a dangerous maverick prone to being too self-indulgent. My neighbours avoided me as much as they could.
4. David Crapper and Mary Vagina's Love Affair
We should stretch the constraints of any medium, dear audience. We should be vigorously experimental with techniques. And, dear audience, we should not enforce taboos on art! Who’s to say that I’m advocating pedophilia? I’m not! I can hear all you censors! Anyway, a work of art does not channel the thoughts and opinions of a person. This is particularly paramount with fiction – as opposed to, say, a pop song – because it is only meant to portray a certain topic within a certain canvas. If you find this disturbing, you are disturbed with the moral issue of paedophilia – not with the author of the subversive work in question.
3. Finding The Author
They settled themselves in the car and I felt them getting nearer and nearer. It's funny how you get these strange - somewhat psychic - feelings and thoughts. I know Jane and I know Dennis. I just thought that these two would really get on well together, so that's why I paired them up. Jane kept telling me about this sensation she felt when driving through that bridge, and it immediately clicked - Dennis. He had cut himself off from me and all the rest of his friends to live a life of solitude. I don't know, either, what crime he commited; but I'm still sure I'll see him again - again with Jane. Being an author, I get lots of letters, and I befriend many people this way. I met both Jane and Dennis this way, and I could see a real interlocking similarity between them. They both wrote almost identically. I sent Jane down; I knew she'd do a fine job of it all. I have no idea why Dennis got persecuted.
But they never came, and I got a knock on the door - the police. And I ran away. I ran to be under the bridge, where Dennis had previously been. And I got the strongest sensation I'd ever experienced: Jane and Dennis in a car. They left for my home, and I wouldn't be there, so I presumed that they'd leave alltogether to live together. And I lose my riches and I handicap my writing capabilities, but I know that I've done a good job by fixing them up. So I shall perish with these fish, Kafka, Huxley and Orwell. And I will hope that some writer helps me one day, by getting me out of this hell barricaded by a fervid wildlife.
2. Strandenforp's Drunken, Cerebral Outsider
The overhanging bulb dimly lit the small, crowded pub. A dingy glass caked in muck blurred the image of night; the image of violent waves; the image of wind whirling inanimate objects towards all directions; the image of a light twirling in the distance with the water, overlooking the town of Strandenforp; the unforgivable image of sea augmenting its length towards new, unknown islands which may or may not house more content souls, for the residents of Strandenforp found themselves in a state of abject, desolate misery.
The pub was a hole of solace, as it – despite its modest, limited and cramped room – blocked out the misery of the town. There were two contradicting glasses for the residents of Strandenforp: the glass of drink, embodying the epitome of happiness bursting out with euphoria; and accompanying this glass of merriness came the glass of doom, displaying what they sought to escape at all moments. These two glasses clashed at once and, therefore, raised a standstill: everyone stood silent, mouths wide open and full of drink, eyes ajar with anger. Time stood still at the pub.
1. Victoria red (Novel extract No. 1)
There was a small but excited crowd gathered by the outside of a public park and near the car-park of a building that was hidden by some bushes and a couple of trees. I joined the crowd made up of about twenty people, discovering that this was some sort of musical performance, despite the awkward environment and aura it would be taking place within. The crowd eagerly conversed about 'Victoria Red', an ageing old woman that apparently performed 'mesmerising' shows. I saw, placed on top of the grass, five wooden miniature desks; they were all at different heights and were organised in a circular fashion.
Out of the park's entrance, and into the outer spot of grass, came a ragged old woman with an enormous nose that dangled onto her chin; red un-brushed hair falling off onto all locations of her tatty, grey coat; she always kept her mouth wide open, revealing a set of scraggy, yellow teeth; she wore sunglasses coupled by an American baseball hat; and she carried a bag. Never at a sight of a person had I felt such a fright, and a horrid repugnance covered my mind. The crowd went ecstatic, clapping and hollering like mad: "Victorrrrriiiiarrrrrr!!!!!! Yesssssss!!!!!!!!!!"
Which is your favourite? Have your say here.
I relied on the pills. I don't know what they're called, but they charge my emotions and inspire me. I had writer's block for four years, and these small things boosted my creativity; I wrote five novels in one year. But the pills turned me into a dangerously introverted individual. I detached myself from reality and retreated to the world of dreams, surrealist paintings which were hung all over my walls, and the pianola which played modern music throughout every single hour of every single day. I also experienced hallucinations: I saw blue devils, dead children and golden parrots. The press regarded me as a dangerous maverick prone to being too self-indulgent. My neighbours avoided me as much as they could.
4. David Crapper and Mary Vagina's Love Affair
We should stretch the constraints of any medium, dear audience. We should be vigorously experimental with techniques. And, dear audience, we should not enforce taboos on art! Who’s to say that I’m advocating pedophilia? I’m not! I can hear all you censors! Anyway, a work of art does not channel the thoughts and opinions of a person. This is particularly paramount with fiction – as opposed to, say, a pop song – because it is only meant to portray a certain topic within a certain canvas. If you find this disturbing, you are disturbed with the moral issue of paedophilia – not with the author of the subversive work in question.
3. Finding The Author
They settled themselves in the car and I felt them getting nearer and nearer. It's funny how you get these strange - somewhat psychic - feelings and thoughts. I know Jane and I know Dennis. I just thought that these two would really get on well together, so that's why I paired them up. Jane kept telling me about this sensation she felt when driving through that bridge, and it immediately clicked - Dennis. He had cut himself off from me and all the rest of his friends to live a life of solitude. I don't know, either, what crime he commited; but I'm still sure I'll see him again - again with Jane. Being an author, I get lots of letters, and I befriend many people this way. I met both Jane and Dennis this way, and I could see a real interlocking similarity between them. They both wrote almost identically. I sent Jane down; I knew she'd do a fine job of it all. I have no idea why Dennis got persecuted.
But they never came, and I got a knock on the door - the police. And I ran away. I ran to be under the bridge, where Dennis had previously been. And I got the strongest sensation I'd ever experienced: Jane and Dennis in a car. They left for my home, and I wouldn't be there, so I presumed that they'd leave alltogether to live together. And I lose my riches and I handicap my writing capabilities, but I know that I've done a good job by fixing them up. So I shall perish with these fish, Kafka, Huxley and Orwell. And I will hope that some writer helps me one day, by getting me out of this hell barricaded by a fervid wildlife.
2. Strandenforp's Drunken, Cerebral Outsider
The overhanging bulb dimly lit the small, crowded pub. A dingy glass caked in muck blurred the image of night; the image of violent waves; the image of wind whirling inanimate objects towards all directions; the image of a light twirling in the distance with the water, overlooking the town of Strandenforp; the unforgivable image of sea augmenting its length towards new, unknown islands which may or may not house more content souls, for the residents of Strandenforp found themselves in a state of abject, desolate misery.
The pub was a hole of solace, as it – despite its modest, limited and cramped room – blocked out the misery of the town. There were two contradicting glasses for the residents of Strandenforp: the glass of drink, embodying the epitome of happiness bursting out with euphoria; and accompanying this glass of merriness came the glass of doom, displaying what they sought to escape at all moments. These two glasses clashed at once and, therefore, raised a standstill: everyone stood silent, mouths wide open and full of drink, eyes ajar with anger. Time stood still at the pub.
1. Victoria red (Novel extract No. 1)
There was a small but excited crowd gathered by the outside of a public park and near the car-park of a building that was hidden by some bushes and a couple of trees. I joined the crowd made up of about twenty people, discovering that this was some sort of musical performance, despite the awkward environment and aura it would be taking place within. The crowd eagerly conversed about 'Victoria Red', an ageing old woman that apparently performed 'mesmerising' shows. I saw, placed on top of the grass, five wooden miniature desks; they were all at different heights and were organised in a circular fashion.
Out of the park's entrance, and into the outer spot of grass, came a ragged old woman with an enormous nose that dangled onto her chin; red un-brushed hair falling off onto all locations of her tatty, grey coat; she always kept her mouth wide open, revealing a set of scraggy, yellow teeth; she wore sunglasses coupled by an American baseball hat; and she carried a bag. Never at a sight of a person had I felt such a fright, and a horrid repugnance covered my mind. The crowd went ecstatic, clapping and hollering like mad: "Victorrrrriiiiarrrrrr!!!!!! Yesssssss!!!!!!!!!!"
Which is your favourite? Have your say here.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
The Mole
shattering the darkness
there's the mole
there's the mole
shattering the darkness
there's the mole
there's the mole
be careful with what you say, joe
recondite is my message
wash the mole, joe
recondite is my message
the nightmare will haunt you forever
don't try to escape
the mole will eat your socks, joe
don't try to escape
cringe-inducing is my message, joe
it will haunt you forever
the mole of death is waiting for the darkness to subside
and for the brightness to collide
resulting in your impending death
don't try to escape
-------------
BOOKS I'VE READ SO FAR THIS YEAR
J. G. Ballard - Empire of the Sun
Roberto Arlt - El Juguete Rabioso
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
J. G. Ballard - The Unlimited Dream Company
William Goldling - Lord of the Flies
Samuel Beckett - Molloy
James Purdy - 63: Dream Palace
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Cien Anos de Soledad
J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World
J. G. Ballard - Concrete Island
J. G. Ballard - Miracles of Life
J. G. Ballard - The Kindness of Women
Paul Auster - Moon Palace
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Samuel Beckett - Waiting For Godot
J. G. Ballard - Running Wild
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Peter Shaffer - Equus
George Orwell - 1984
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
Lous-Ferdinand Celine - Journey to the End of the Night
Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury (for the third time)
-----------------
LAST FM
----------------
"The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping molls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world."
there's the mole
there's the mole
shattering the darkness
there's the mole
there's the mole
be careful with what you say, joe
recondite is my message
wash the mole, joe
recondite is my message
the nightmare will haunt you forever
don't try to escape
the mole will eat your socks, joe
don't try to escape
cringe-inducing is my message, joe
it will haunt you forever
the mole of death is waiting for the darkness to subside
and for the brightness to collide
resulting in your impending death
don't try to escape
-------------
BOOKS I'VE READ SO FAR THIS YEAR
J. G. Ballard - Empire of the Sun
Roberto Arlt - El Juguete Rabioso
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
J. G. Ballard - The Unlimited Dream Company
William Goldling - Lord of the Flies
Samuel Beckett - Molloy
James Purdy - 63: Dream Palace
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Cien Anos de Soledad
J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World
J. G. Ballard - Concrete Island
J. G. Ballard - Miracles of Life
J. G. Ballard - The Kindness of Women
Paul Auster - Moon Palace
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Samuel Beckett - Waiting For Godot
J. G. Ballard - Running Wild
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Peter Shaffer - Equus
George Orwell - 1984
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
Lous-Ferdinand Celine - Journey to the End of the Night
Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury (for the third time)
-----------------
LAST FM
----------------
"The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping molls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world."
Alex and Beethoven
He's actually not talking about Beethoven in this novel extract, but what the fuck.
Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of the lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, grvity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like words of like platinum, into the thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers. Pee and em in their bedroom next door had learnt now not to knock on the wall with complaints of what they called noise. I had taught them. Now they would take sleep-pills. Perhaps, knowing the joy I had in my night music, they had already taken them. As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their listos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them, and indeed when the music, which was one movement only, rose to the top of its big highest tower, then, lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaaaah with the bliss of it. And so the lovely music glided to its glowing case.
Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of the lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, grvity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like words of like platinum, into the thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers. Pee and em in their bedroom next door had learnt now not to knock on the wall with complaints of what they called noise. I had taught them. Now they would take sleep-pills. Perhaps, knowing the joy I had in my night music, they had already taken them. As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their listos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them, and indeed when the music, which was one movement only, rose to the top of its big highest tower, then, lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaaaah with the bliss of it. And so the lovely music glided to its glowing case.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
TOP 5 CLASSICAL COMPOSERS ACCORDING TO SIMON KING
Unlike my blog entry entitled 'TOP 5 WRITERS ACCORDING TO SIMON KING', I won't write the little description for each artist; I will filch them from Wikipedia. This is because my musical knowledge is very limited. I was going to put John Zorn and Frank Zappa on this list, but decided against it as they are usually pigeonholed into jazz and rock gategories instead of classical.
5
Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer. He is a pioneer of minimalism, although his music has increasingly deviated from a purely minimalist style. Reich's innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially in America.
4
Claude Debussy
Gyorgy Ligeti
György Sándor Ligeti (May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006) was a Romanian born 20th century composer. Born to a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family, he briefly lived in Hungary before later becoming an Austrian citizen. Many of his works are well known in classical music circles, but to the general public, he is best known for the various pieces featured in the Stanley Kubrick films 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut.
Claude Debussy
Achille-Claude Debussy (pronounced [aʃil klod dəbysi]) (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he is considered one of the most prominent figures working within the field of Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. Debussy was not only among the most important of all French composers but also was a central figure in all European music at the turn of the twentieth century.
Debussy's music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to twentieth century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as Symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.
3Gyorgy Ligeti
György Sándor Ligeti (May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006) was a Romanian born 20th century composer. Born to a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family, he briefly lived in Hungary before later becoming an Austrian citizen. Many of his works are well known in classical music circles, but to the general public, he is best known for the various pieces featured in the Stanley Kubrick films 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut.2
Bela Bartok
Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer and pianist, considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology
Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer and pianist, considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology1
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (Russian Ballets): L'Oiseau de feu ("The Firebird") (1910), Petrushka (1911/1947), and Le sacre du printemps ("The Rite of Spring") (1913). The Rite, whose premiere provoked a riot, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure; to this day its vision of pagan rituals, enacted in an imaginary ancient Russia continues to dazzle and overwhelm audiences.
After this first Russian phase he turned to neoclassicism in the 1920s. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, symphony), frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity, and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example J.S. Bach, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky.
In the 1950s he adopted serial procedures, using the new techniques over the final twenty years of his life to write works that were briefer and of greater rhythmic, harmonic, and textural complexity than his earlier music. Their intricacy notwithstanding, these pieces share traits with all of Stravinsky's earlier output; rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few cells comprising only two or three notes, and clarity of form, instrumentation, and of utterance.
The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges
The best piece of writing I've read.
----------------------
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms.
First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.
Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. (1) This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids. This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)
For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators.
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.
At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity's basic mysteries -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be found. It is verisimilar that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars. For four centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons ... There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.
As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect suggested that the searches should cease and that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities were obliged to issue severe orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder.
Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the ``treasures'' destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma. Counter to general opinion, I venture to suppose that the consequences of the Purifiers' depredations have been exaggerated by the horror these fanatics produced. They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical.
We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone vestiges of this remote functionary's cult still persist. Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they have exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; (3) I pray to the unknown gods that a man -- just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! -- may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the ``feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.'' These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)
The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
I have just written the word ``infinite.'' I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.
----------------------
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms.
First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.
Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. (1) This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids. This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)
For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators.
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.
At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity's basic mysteries -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be found. It is verisimilar that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars. For four centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons ... There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.
As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect suggested that the searches should cease and that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities were obliged to issue severe orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder.
Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the ``treasures'' destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma. Counter to general opinion, I venture to suppose that the consequences of the Purifiers' depredations have been exaggerated by the horror these fanatics produced. They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical.
We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone vestiges of this remote functionary's cult still persist. Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they have exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; (3) I pray to the unknown gods that a man -- just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! -- may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the ``feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.'' These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)
The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
I have just written the word ``infinite.'' I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Top 10 books
I decided to make this blog entry more spiffy by adding images and words to it.
10. A Brief Life - Juan Carlos Onetti
This novel by the Uruguayan author of the acclaimed The Shipyard concerns Breusen, who seeks to escape the dreary existence of his everyday life by channeling his consciousness into other people - some real, some imagined.
9. The Unlimited Dream Company - J. G. Ballard
When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is strangely transformed. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man's urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.
8. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster (3 novellas)
Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.
7. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
Pedro Paramo - father, overlord, lover and murderer - dominates the landscape of the novel which flows hynotically through dreams, desires and memories. The novel propels the reader down a dusty forgotten road to a town of death, a place populated by ghosts and living memories.
6. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rasholnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. As he embarks on a dangerous cat and mouse game, he is pursued by his conscience.
5. Bestiario - Julio Cortazar (short story collection)
In these eight masterpieces there is no room for the smallest sign of stumbling or youthful undertones: they are perfect. These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to another dimension, one of nightmare or revelation. In each text, surprise and uneasiness are ingredients added to the indescribable pleasure of its reading. These stories may upset readers due to a very rare characteristic in literature: They stare at us as if waiting for something in return. After reading these true classics, our opinion of the world cannot remain the same.
4. Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard
The heartrending story of a British boy's four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard's own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author's own disturbing experience of war in own time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.
3. The Trial - Franz Kafka
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.
2. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges (short story collection)
By common consent, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest writers to have emerged from Latin America. His finest work is "Ficciones", a collection of brilliantly-crafted, essay-like short stories.
1. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The story of the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family told through the eyes of three of its members. In different ways they prove to be inadequate to their own family history, unable to deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present.
10. A Brief Life - Juan Carlos Onetti
This novel by the Uruguayan author of the acclaimed The Shipyard concerns Breusen, who seeks to escape the dreary existence of his everyday life by channeling his consciousness into other people - some real, some imagined.
9. The Unlimited Dream Company - J. G. Ballard
When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is strangely transformed. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man's urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.
8. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster (3 novellas)
Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.7. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
Pedro Paramo - father, overlord, lover and murderer - dominates the landscape of the novel which flows hynotically through dreams, desires and memories. The novel propels the reader down a dusty forgotten road to a town of death, a place populated by ghosts and living memories.
6. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rasholnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. As he embarks on a dangerous cat and mouse game, he is pursued by his conscience.5. Bestiario - Julio Cortazar (short story collection)
In these eight masterpieces there is no room for the smallest sign of stumbling or youthful undertones: they are perfect. These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to another dimension, one of nightmare or revelation. In each text, surprise and uneasiness are ingredients added to the indescribable pleasure of its reading. These stories may upset readers due to a very rare characteristic in literature: They stare at us as if waiting for something in return. After reading these true classics, our opinion of the world cannot remain the same.
4. Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard
The heartrending story of a British boy's four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard's own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author's own disturbing experience of war in own time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged.
3. The Trial - Franz Kafka
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.
2. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges (short story collection)
By common consent, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest writers to have emerged from Latin America. His finest work is "Ficciones", a collection of brilliantly-crafted, essay-like short stories.
1. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The story of the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family told through the eyes of three of its members. In different ways they prove to be inadequate to their own family history, unable to deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present.
Friday, 2 May 2008
The way music is packaged
Exactly, I think that people are 'simply too lazy to delve into hidden gems underpinning popular music' for the very inherent reason of us being 'deprived from discovering technically complex music'.
There's no-one looking for a different sort of musical experience, because people simply do no not know of its existence. I think that major record labels need to take risks - they need to promote musical recordings which are challenging. As I mentioned in my blog, too, 'popular' and 'serious' culture needs to be bridged together ('technically complex musical' is usually lumped into serious culture). Music is wallpaper because record companies want it to be wallpaper - the audience at large has no fucking clue.
My reasoning behind mentioning Mozart's time is not some kind of attempt at saying 'back in this day...', but to illustrate an example when music was not commercialized. The commercialization of music is something that has arised since the arrival of the recording industry. I obviously think that the access to recording equipment is of a HUGE advantage, but it means that it gets to the stage where music is, indeed, pop-corn - something to be consumed; it hasn't necessarily dwarfed genuine music-making because this is part of human nature and psychology, but it has hindered the unity and awareness between the performer and audience.
I think that you'll find that, once given an appropriate introduction, listeners of 'popular music' with a tendency towards 'passive musical interpretation', would find merit in purchasing/downloading music coming from a differing genre/field to their own.
There's no-one looking for a different sort of musical experience, because people simply do no not know of its existence. I think that major record labels need to take risks - they need to promote musical recordings which are challenging. As I mentioned in my blog, too, 'popular' and 'serious' culture needs to be bridged together ('technically complex musical' is usually lumped into serious culture). Music is wallpaper because record companies want it to be wallpaper - the audience at large has no fucking clue.
My reasoning behind mentioning Mozart's time is not some kind of attempt at saying 'back in this day...', but to illustrate an example when music was not commercialized. The commercialization of music is something that has arised since the arrival of the recording industry. I obviously think that the access to recording equipment is of a HUGE advantage, but it means that it gets to the stage where music is, indeed, pop-corn - something to be consumed; it hasn't necessarily dwarfed genuine music-making because this is part of human nature and psychology, but it has hindered the unity and awareness between the performer and audience.
I think that you'll find that, once given an appropriate introduction, listeners of 'popular music' with a tendency towards 'passive musical interpretation', would find merit in purchasing/downloading music coming from a differing genre/field to their own.
Monday, 14 April 2008
'What I Believe' by J. G. Ballard
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.
I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.
I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.
I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.
I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.
I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.
I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.
I believe in nothing.
I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.
I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.
I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their disheveled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.
I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.
I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon’s knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.
I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.
I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.
I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.
I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.
I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.
I believe in the next five minutes.
I believe in the history of my feet.
I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.
I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.
I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.
I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.
I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.
I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion.
I believe in pain.
I believe in despair.
I believe in all children.
I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.
I believe all excuses.
I believe all reasons.
I believe all hallucinations.
I believe all anger.
I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.
I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.
Thursday, 20 March 2008
The remote edges
Park bench at 4 AM. Woods and the moon at 5 AM. Dark.
While you rot and vegetate in your warm home, I'm out at the remote edges. The places no-one visits.... I'm surprised I'm the only person that goes out to the far, distant countryside; it surpasses the environment where these dull people prepare for death.
As I walk past the suburban streets at night, accompanied by lamp-posts that illuminate my path, I see 40-year-old replicas of my mother ironing as the television is on. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.
THE SUBURBS DREAM OF VIOLENCE.
While you rot and vegetate in your warm home, I'm out at the remote edges. The places no-one visits.... I'm surprised I'm the only person that goes out to the far, distant countryside; it surpasses the environment where these dull people prepare for death.
As I walk past the suburban streets at night, accompanied by lamp-posts that illuminate my path, I see 40-year-old replicas of my mother ironing as the television is on. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.
THE SUBURBS DREAM OF VIOLENCE.
Saturday, 12 January 2008
TOP 5 WRITERS ACCORDING TO SIMON KING
5
Paul Auster
Auster fuses the metric pace of crime thrillers with metaphysical subjects, making this certain genre of fiction - which usually appeals to smaller, intellectual audiences - easily accessible and more exciting for the standard literary punter.
His characters are seekers who find themselves under new situations which are coincidences: chance events. They adjust to it in a quest to find answers about themselves - an identity.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=544047531449302445&q=paul+auster&total=82&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
His characters are seekers who find themselves under new situations which are coincidences: chance events. They adjust to it in a quest to find answers about themselves - an identity.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=544047531449302445&q=paul+auster&total=82&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
4
Julio Cortazar
Cortazar, along Poe and Borges, ranks as one of the greatest short story writers. He usually sets his stories in realistic situations, but slowly begins to integrate fantastic elements, surprising and unsettling the reader. The way he strings words together is absolutely wonderful; he manages to hold the reader's attention without any real plot development. Along with writers like Rulfo, Onetti and Borges, he deserves to be credited as one of the creators of 'magic realism'.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3562250863327291954&q=julio+cortazar&total=322&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1
William Faulkner
A writer who is more acclaimed for 'form' rather than 'content'. Faulkner writes from many angles at once; he doesn't write chronologically, he gets under the skin of his characters via a dense use of stream of consciousness. Unlike Joyce (who he hasn't got that much in common with), I find that what he is communicating is far more accessible and meaningful. At heart, he is still a storyteller depicting the lives of very simple people living in the south of U. S. A., and he does it beautifully well.
2
Jorge Luis Borges
The best writer that blurs our perceptions between fantasy and reality - the ultimate metaphysical writer. His short stories can be read and read and re-read while still maintaining the initial 'wow' factor one initially gets. He was not 'erudite' as many say, but had a child-like fascination for literature that never diminished with his old age.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5764775529251127235&q=jorge+luis+borges&total=275&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3
1
J. G. Ballard
I love the way all his characters crave the dangerous and the bizarre.
Julio Cortazar
Cortazar, along Poe and Borges, ranks as one of the greatest short story writers. He usually sets his stories in realistic situations, but slowly begins to integrate fantastic elements, surprising and unsettling the reader. The way he strings words together is absolutely wonderful; he manages to hold the reader's attention without any real plot development. Along with writers like Rulfo, Onetti and Borges, he deserves to be credited as one of the creators of 'magic realism'.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3562250863327291954&q=julio+cortazar&total=322&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1
3
A writer who is more acclaimed for 'form' rather than 'content'. Faulkner writes from many angles at once; he doesn't write chronologically, he gets under the skin of his characters via a dense use of stream of consciousness. Unlike Joyce (who he hasn't got that much in common with), I find that what he is communicating is far more accessible and meaningful. At heart, he is still a storyteller depicting the lives of very simple people living in the south of U. S. A., and he does it beautifully well.
2
Jorge Luis Borges
The best writer that blurs our perceptions between fantasy and reality - the ultimate metaphysical writer. His short stories can be read and read and re-read while still maintaining the initial 'wow' factor one initially gets. He was not 'erudite' as many say, but had a child-like fascination for literature that never diminished with his old age.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5764775529251127235&q=jorge+luis+borges&total=275&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3
1
J. G. Ballard
I love the way all his characters crave the dangerous and the bizarre.
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