Shannon O'Neill » literature

Which science fiction writer am I?

Shannon — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:40:34 +0000

Glad you asked.

I am:

Olaf Stapledon

Standing outside the science fiction “field”, he wrote fictional explorations of the futures of whole species and galaxies.

I’m embarrased to admit that I’d never heard of him. But I’m keen to find out more. He was influenced by Nietzsche, and went on to influence Stanislaw Lem. Sounds like my kinda guy!

Which science fiction writer are you?

TINA time

Shannon — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:04:00 +0000

This Is Not Art is on in Newcastle this weekend. It’s my favourite Australian festival – if you’ve never been, you should check it out. I’ll be doing a couple of talks and a couple of performances.

Diaspora

Shannon — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 13:13:39 +0000

I finished reading Greg Egan’s Diaspora the other day. What a great novel – it really scratched my posthuman itch. Sure it’s not perfect: some of the plot and character development was weak, but the world he creates is plausible, detailed and compelling. Bring on the Introdus!

I’d love to see someone try to make a film of it. It’d be the ultimate FX challenge, with its scapes and multidimensional macrospheres.

It’s embarrasing that it took me so long to get around to reading it – a friend bought me the paperback a few years ago. It was published in 1997 and has been very influential, especially among Antipodeans involved in electronic music, eg:

Julian Oliver aka de|ire, released an album called Diaspora in 2003.
Graham Freeman’s blog Virulent Memes was, I think, named after a phrase from the book.
Brisbane sound artists Lloyd Barrett and Joe Musgrove have a project called Diaspora.

And I know that Peter is also a fan of Egan’s work.

I was a big cyberpunk fan in the 80s but haven’t read much SF since then. Now I want more! Any recommendations?

After Theory

Shannon — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 07:21:46 +0000

I’ve started reading Terry Eagleton’s After Theory. It’s quite enjoyable – less rigorous than Literary Theory – An Introduction (not surprising as it’s a different sort of book – he’s not obliged to summarise key thinkers one after the other) and more like a curmudgeonly rant, albeit a lucid, witty and ethical one.

What’s missing is his own biography (although he has written his memoirs elsewhere). It looms large in the background, but I want him to acknowledge it more – maybe he will later in the book. For example, when he says that cultural theory is “really a product of an extraordinary decade and a half, from about 1965 to 1980″ (pp. 23-24) and that “Not much that has been written since has matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers” (p. 1) he sounds a lot like those irritating baby boomers who drone on about how music was so much better in their day.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships between art, theory and politics, so I found the following passage interesting:

Marxism had been badly tarnished in the West by the monstrosities of Stalinism. But many felt that it had also been discredited by changes in capitalism itself. It seemed ill-adapted to a new kind of capitalist system which revolved on consumption rather than production, image rather than reality, the media rather than cotton mills. Above all, it seemed ill-adapted to affluence. The post-war economic boom may have been on its last legs by the 1960s, but it was still setting the political pace. Many of the problems which preoccupied militant students and radical theorists in the West were ones bred by progress, not poverty. They were problems of beaurocratic regulation, conspicuous consumption, sophisticated military hardware, technologies which seemed to be lurching out of control. The sense of a world which was claustrophobically coded, administered, shot through with signs and conventions from end to end, helped to give birth to structuralism, which investigates the hidden codes and conventions which produce human meaning. The 1960s were stifling as well as swinging. There were anxieties about packaged learning, advertising and the despotic power of the commodity. Some years later, the cultural theory which examined all this would itself be at risk of becoming one more glossy commodity, a way of touting one’s symbolic capital. These were all questions of culture, lived experience, utopian desire, the emotional and perceptual damage wrought by a two-dimensional society. They were not matters which Marxism traditionally had much to say about.

Pleasure, desire, art, language, the media, the body, gender, ethnicity: a single word to sum all these up would be culture. Culture, in a sense of the word which included Bill Wyman and fast food as well as Debussy and Dostoevsky, was what Marxism seemed to be lacking. And this is one reason why the dialogue with Marxism was pitched largely on that terrain. Culture was a way for the civilized, humanistic left to distance itself from the crass philistinism of actually existing socialism. Nor was it surprising that it was cultural theory, rather than politics, economics or orthodox philosophy, which took issue with Marxism in those turbulent years. Students of culture quite often tend to be politically radical, if not easily disciplined. Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness is a deeply disturbing affair.

In any case, art and literature encompass a great many ideas and experiences which are hard to reconcile with the present political set-up. They also raise questions of the quality of life in a world where experience itself seems brittle and degraded. How in such conditions can you produce worthwhile art in the first place? Would you not need to change society in order to flourish as an artist? Besides, those who deal with art speak the language of value rather than price. They deal with works whose depth and intensity show up the meagreness of everyday life in a market-obsessed society. They are also trained to imagine alternatives to the actual. Art encourages you to fantasize and desire. For all these reasons, it is easy to see why it is students of art or English rather than chemical engineering who tend to staff the barricades.

Students of chemical engineering, however, are in general better at getting out of bed than students of art and English. Some of the very qualities which attract cultural specialists to the political left are also the ones which make them hard to organize. They are the jokers in the political pack, reluctant joiners who tend to be more interested in utopia than trade unions. Unlike Oscar Wilde’s philistine, they know the value of everything and the price of nothing. You would not put Arthur Rimbaud on the sanitation committee. In the 1960s and 70s, this made cultural thinkers ideal candidates for being inside and outside Marxism simultaneously. In Britain, a prominent cultural theorist like Stuart Hall occupied this position for decades, before shifting decisively into the non-Marxist camp.

To be inside and outside a position at the same time – to occupy a territory while loitering sceptically on the boundary – is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not always a painless one. One has only to think of the great names of twentieth-century English literature, almost all of whom moved between two or more national cultures. Later, this ambiguous position was to be inherited by the new ‘French’ cultural theorists. Not many of them were French in origin, and not many of those who were were heterosexual. Some hailed from Algeria, some from Bulgaria, and others from utopia. As the 1970s wore on, however, quite a few of these erstwhile radicals began to come in from the cold. The passage toward the depoliticized 80s and 90s had been opened.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, pp. 38-40.

Eagleton on Bloom

Shannon — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 06:26:27 +0000

Two very different American critics endebted to Freud are Kenneth Burke, who eclectically blends Freud, Marx and linguistics to produce his own suggestive view of the literary work as a form of symbolic action, and Harold Bloom, who has used the work of Freud to launch one of the most daringly original literary theories of the past decade. What Bloom does, in effect, is to rewrite literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. Poets live anxiously in the shadow of a ’strong’ poet who came before them, as sons are oppressed by their fathers; and any particular poem can be read as an attempt to escape this ‘anxiety of influence’ by its systematic remoulding of a previous poem. The poet, locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating ‘precursor’, will seek to disarm that strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursor poem; in this sense all poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as ‘misreadings’ or ‘misprisions’ of them, attempts to fend off their overwhelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. Every poet is ‘belated’, the last in a tradition; the strong poet is the one with the courage to acknowledge this belatedness and set about undermining the precursor’s power. Any poem, indeed, is nothing but such an undermining – a series of devices, which can be seen both as rhetorical strategies and psychoanalytic defence mechanisms, for undoing and outdoing another poem. The meaning of a poem is another poem.

Bloom’s literary theory represents an impassioned, defiant return to the Protestant Romantic ‘tradition’ from Spenser and Milton to Blake, Shelley and Yeats, a tradition ousted by the conservative Anglo-Catholic lineage (Donne, Herbert, Pope, Johnson, Hopkins) mapped out by Eliot, Leavis and their followers. Bloom is the prophetic spokesman for the creative imagination in the modern age, reading literary history as an heroic battle of giants or mighty psychic drama, trusting to the ‘will to expression’ of the strong poet in his struggle for self-origination. Such doughty Romantic individualism is fiercely at odds with the sceptical, anti-humanist ethos of a deconstructive age, and indeed Bloom has defended the value of individual poetic ‘voice’ and genius against his Derridean colleagues (Hartman, de Man, Hillis Miller) at Yale. His hope is that he may snatch from the jaws of a deconstructive criticism he in some ways respects a Romantic humanism which will reinstate author, intention and the power of the imagination, Such a humanism will wage war with the ’serene linguistic nihilism’ which Bloom rightly discerns in much American deconstruction, turning from the mere endless undoing of determinate meaning to a vision of poetry as human will and affirmation. The strenuous, embattled, apocalyptic tone of much of his writing, with its outlandish spawning of esoteric terms, is witness to the strain and desperateness of this enterprise. Bloom’s criticism starkly exposes the dilemma of the modern liberal or Romantic humanist – the fact that on the one hand no reversion to a serene, optimistic human faith is possible after Marx, Freud and post-structuralism, but that on the other hand any humanism which like Bloom’s has taken the agonizing pressures of such doctrines is bound to be fatally compromised and contaminated by them. Bloom’s epical battles of poetic giants retain the psychic splendour of a pre-Freudian age, but have lost its innocence: they are domestic rows, scenes of guilt, envy, anxiety and aggression. No humanistic literary theory which overlooked such realities could offer itself as reputably ‘modern’ at all; but any such theory which takes them on board is bound to be sobered and soured by them to point where its own capacity to affirm becomes almost maniacally wilful. Bloom advances far enough down the primrose path of American deconstruction to be able to scramble back to the heroically human only by a Nietzschian appeal to the ‘will to power’ and ‘will to persuasion’ of the individual imagination which is bound to remain arbitrary and gestural. In this exclusively patriarchal world of fathers and sons, everything comes to centre with increasing rhetorical stridency on power, struggle, strength of will; criticism itself for Bloom is just as much a form of poetry as poems are implicit literary criticism of other poems, and whether a critical reading ’succeeds’ is in the end not at all a question of its truth-value but of the rhetorical force of the critic himself. It is humanism on the extreme edge, grounded in nothing but its own assertive faith, stranded between a discredited rationalism on the one hand and an intolerable scepticism on the other.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory – An Introduction, pp. 183-185

The first par in particular suggests a psychoanalytic approach to thinking about appropriation, originality, influence, etc. I’m skeptical of psychoanalysis, but it’s still something to which I should give some consideration.

tabs

Shannon — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 03:04:59 +0000

Actor-network theory

Feel Tank Chicago

Global Cemetary Online with Sad News Update

The Interruptor – VST Devices

Possible and Impossible Aporias

Resounding the Cinematic – Resonance, Proximity and the Acousmatic in the Apparatus

The Shannonizer

Sprockets (television)

Through the Keyhole

Urbanomic

Eagleton on Barthes

Shannon — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:42:53 +0000

The ‘work of the break’ is Barthes’s astonishing study of Balzac’s story Sarrasine, S/Z (1970). The literary work is now no longer treated as a stable object or delimited structure, and the language of the critic has disowned all pretentions to scientific objectivity. The most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read but those which are ‘writable’ (scriptable) – texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer. It is not exactly as though ‘anything goes’ in interpretation, for Barthes is careful to remark that the work cannot be got to mean anything at all; but literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform than a free space in which it can sport. The ‘writable’ text, usually a modernist one, has no determinate meaning, no settled signifieds, but is plural and diffuse, an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers, a seamless weave of codes and fragments of codes, through, through which the critic may cut his own errant path. There are no beginnings and no ends, no sequences which cannot be reversed, no hierarchy of textual ‘levels’ to tell you what is more or less significant. All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of ‘influence’ but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which which precede or surround the individual work. There is no such thing as literary ‘originality’, no such thing as the ‘first’ literary work: all literature is ‘intertextual’. A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point. The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author, for the ‘death of the author’ is a slogan that modern criticism is now confidently able to proclaim. 1 The biography of the author is, after all, merely another text, which need not be ascribed any special privilege: this text too can be deconstructed. It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming ‘polysemic’ plurality, not the author himself. If there is any place where this seething multiplicity of the text is momentarily focused, it is not the author but the reader.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory – An Introduction, pp 137-138.

tabs

Shannon — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 03:54:56 +0000

aut-op-sy

BK SynthLab

Boston, Massachusetts

The Contradiction of Trotsky – Claude Lefort

Fat Ass Plugins

Fate, Resignation, Persistence, Affirmation, Endurance: Beckett and Stoicism

Hardwired to seek beauty

Sample Rate Conversion Comparisons

Voxengo

Zone Mobius

links

Shannon — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 09:44:19 +0000

AudioMasters Forum

bcontrol forum

BCR video

The catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell

digitalfishphones

electro-music

Electronic Music 411

energyXT

Freeware 2005 VSTi/VST Roundup

The Grey Commons – strategic considerations in the copyfight

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

InstaJungle 0.3

i, robot by Cory Doctorow

KVR Audio

MIDI NRPN and RPN

mulch-discuss

SIR – Impulse Response Processor

Inspector and InspectorXL

smartelectronix

Synthedit and SynthMaker

Tech Talk with Exile

theoria: Zizek!

Tobybear Productions

Word

links

Shannon — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 03:48:38 +0000

100 things we didn’t know this time last year

AudioMulch 1.0rc1

Behringer B-Control Presets & Templates

Dungeons & Dragons

Increasingly Clear

Stuckism

Traveller (role-playing game)

The University and the Undercommons

X-Men

Jandek Studies

Shannon — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 06:31:09 +0000

The Jandek list has been in good form recently:

Subject: [Jandek] TIME FOR JANDEK weekly radio program
From: “Cecil Doyle”
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 13:52:52 -0600

TIME FOR JANDEK….a weekly radio program dedicted to the Man, the Myth premieres this Saturday morning (and every Saturday morning thereafter) at 3am CST on KRVS, a 100,000-watt Public Radio affilliate in Lafayette, Louisiana. An hour of Jandek music, news and speculation each and every week. KRVS’ webstream is available at www.krvs.org

Cecil Doyle
Music Director, KRVS

Subject: [Jandek] Jandek in belgium.
From: Jungle
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:44:20 +0100

He arrived in belgium on tuesday and was recognised by a friend in the streets of Hasselt.
He did not check into the hotel the organisation booked for him. He chose another place to stay.
Peoople saw jandek on the banks of the “DEMER’ river and in The public parks of Hasselt.
He checked into the venue saturday morning11 O clock. Checked the sound and asked for only blue lights, he played on the accoustic piano for an hour and he dissapeared as he came.
he only returned just minutes before the show and got on stage immediately.
the ancient clock that stands behind the bar and that worked normally for six years suddenly stopped ticking the moment jandek went on stage.
120 peaple in the hall. jandek opened a tekst book he was carrying and played for an Hour. only in blue light.
he played the same thing for 7/8 of the time. with his left hand he played easy paterns and improvised simple melodies with his rght.. many people left the hall in tears before the ending og the show.
people applauded after every song. For the rest of the time the public was very quit . We could hear some people receiving SMS massages and there was tumult at the bar. but jandek was not bothered by that as far i could see.
he sang about ‘putting my head on the railway tracks’ or ’strychnine poison in my glass.’
after the show he spend minutes in a dressing room where he refused the 1500 Eu he was given to play and instead demanded the audio recording of the show telling the promotor corwood was going to release the concert on CD later. then he deapeared again.
a delegation of ‘Die Berliner Kunst Bienale’ was there, they want to do a special about Jandek’s cover art in 2006.
I also met a Dutch painter who trades Paintings wirh jandek for original jandek photo’z that look like the covers of the albums.

K.

Subject: [Jandek] Helsinki
From: Markus Metsälä
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 03:05:36 +0200

He played an upright piano and a Finnish harpist, Iro Haarla, accompanied him. The music was extremely beautiful, almost un-Jandek like. Certainly no death-blues, more like music of a person very much at peace with himself, serene, perhaps. Very relaxed feeling throughout the set. One piece, about one hour and ten minutes, no vocals. There was a simple theme that persisted through the whole piece and everything just continued and continued.
Somebody said that his way of playing the piano was a most natural one, and I think I agree. I did think that there was some real interplay with him and the harpist at times, but mostly the harp was just there as a background.
And as usual, he did nothing to recognise the audience, might as well been playing in a deserted bar.

I’m still wondering what to make of it. Certainly a very different type of set from what I saw in Glasgow. So beautiful it almost hurt. And I only now realised how thin he really is, sitting on the piano stool. I hope he is not as sick as the rumours say.

Markus

Subject: Re: [Jandek] Helsinki
From: Markus Metsälä
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 17:37:09 +0200

I actually had a quick word with him today. I was attending a film screening and he was hanging around after the films had ended. I said thanks for the concert and told him I thought it was a very beautiful piece. He seemed surprised at first but then thanked me very politely and and said he was honored that I had liked the concert. He then reached into his pocket and showed me a cd-r which apparently contained the recording of the concert, saying that it will be released on Corwood later on.

Markus

Subject: Re: [Jandek] Helsinki
From: Markus Metsälä
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:22:23 +0200

Quoting BlackMonk:

>> That doesn’t really fit in with the “Jandek as unstable person who can’t
>> stand contact with other people” theory. Do you think maybe he’s a victim of
>> his own image and after every show he wonders “why doesn’t anyone talk to
>> me? Didn’t they like it?”

Yeah, he really didn’t strike me as an unstable person at all. Perhaps a little shy, but that’s all. He listened very attentively to what I said and seemed genuinely pleased that I had liked the concert. I also told him that I thought that the piece was quite different to all the Corwood releases (that I have heard) and also to the shows he did in Glasgow this year. He just nodded slightly but didn’t comment on it.

Anyway, on Sunday he was hanging around the festival venue quite a bit. This didn’t happen on Friday or Saturday, at least as far as I could see. Besides the film screening I saw him attend a concert in the evening. And he was talking to people, he and a member of one of the more “famous” (hah!) Finnish free-folk-drone-psych-whatever groups seemed to be discussing stuff for a long time (I feel very stupid reporting stuff like this…). And there is a rumour that an interview was made! I don’t know yet if this is true and what the interview would be for but I hope to find out soon.

Oh, and the festival compilation. It does include a 4 min track (fades out) of the performance, it’s called Sleeping in the Dawn. It’s a cd-r (looks professional, though) and it was made available on Sunday. If somebody wants to buy a copy I’m sure it will available soon at the festival online shop:

http://www.avantofestival.com/shop_en.php

Markus

Subject: Re: [Jandek] what is the status of his health?
From: Markus Metsälä
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:35:09 +0200

Quoting Yvonne:

>> What are the rumors about Jandek’s health? He looks so thin and
>> emaciated. Has he always looked like this?

I feel quite morbid talking about this but I heard that he has cancer and this was the reason he started performing live. Supposedly this info comes from one of the musicians he has played with. I can’t know for sure if this is true or not.

He certainly doesn’t look too well and seems to wear his hat at all times.
But I hope I’m wrong about all this.

Markus

Subject: [Jandek] And the winner is……?!!?! (JANDEK TOP10 2005)
From: Thierry Bissonnette
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:31:51 -0500

Listening to ‘When I took that train’ and I’m just convinced that this whole Top Ten thing is just incompatible with Jandek’s creative process. Choosing is killing the obsessive wholenesse diffused here, as different periods reflect into each other and are part of a monist transformation. Late Jandek seems an equally important part of the body of work as early or mid-period for me, in fact, I feel this is one of the ‘rules’ of the game J.’s directing in our listeners minds, and none of the arguments discrediting mid or late recordings appears convincing to me. I just think people project their listening history/context, and their Top Ten would probably change if doing the same exercise in a year or two, even if limiting to the 43 first discs.

Anyway, I just dig SHADOW OF LEAVES, WHEN I TOOK THAT TRAIN and other late period albums as much as older discs, but above all I’m interested in the whole thing as a holistic revery. Every album has its flaws that become qualities when considering them in the jandekian system. One great installation/composition, not singular albums.

Thierry

Subject: Re: [Jandek] what is the status of his health?
From: Markus Metsälä
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:17:56 +0200

Quoting Gregory Stanton:

>> I can’t believe you guys are discussing a morbid rumor
>> as if it is fact. Some people are just skinny. If you
>> want to fatten Mr. Smith up, send him some cookies.

I agree. I actually wish I hadn’t mentioned any of this at all. Rumours can be fun but this one is not and it would perhaps be better not to speculate on other peoples health.

Much more important is the fact that he seems to be quite interested in how people perceive his live shows. Even though he gives the impression of only playing for himself. A person who talked quite a bit with him on Sunday says that he had interpreted the audience chatter during the concert (which started to be annoying towards the end) to mean that people don’t like the music. Apparently he even considered not playing live anymore. When he was told that many people had enjoyed the concert and that there had been a lot of discussion after the show about the music he had seemed relieved and happy.

So I would urge people to let him know how much they like the live performances, whether in person if possible or by writing to Corwood. I think we all want him to continue playing live.

Markus

Subject: Re: [Jandek] what is the status of his health?
From: Paul Condon
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 19:00:05 +0000

Incidentally, Jandek didn’t wear his hat at the Glasgow piano gig in May.
Another possible explanation for his thinness is suggested by some of the lyrics on recent albums. On the title track of Worthless Recluse he expresses ambivalence about eating: “I hope I can live till tomorrow and the next day without eating / I’m fed up with eating for a while”.
In Real Afternoons he seems to be disgusted with other people’s consumption: “There’s only one altar / That’s the refrigerator / Where you keep your food”.
You Ancient suggests a quasi-religious approach to diet: “Oh you ancients of the food god / You who showed us how to eat / Which things to eat into our body / And pass through while we stay alive / I want to thank you for your gift”.
Several other songs suggest an ascetic lifestyle and uncomfortableness with materialist modern life, like You Know You Need: “You’d be surprised at how simple your intake can be / You got to clean out the house / Take out all the things you don’t want”. This relates to the spiritual concerns that dominate the bulk Jandek’s releases from Put My Dream On This Planet onwards.
Of course, looking for clues about Jandek in the lyrics is problematic and fallible, but I feel more comfortable about this sort of speculation rather than commenting on rumours (though the rumour in this case is a natural enough reaction). I just want to suggest that his appearance may be at least partially due to an abstinent lifestyle. This is not to deny the possibility that he is or has been suffering from an illness. However he is obviously not too ill to travel and perform fairly lengthy sets. His age alone would be enough of an incentive to finally get it together to play live anyway.

Subject: Re: [******] Re: [Jandek] And the winner is……?!!?! (JANDEK TOP10 2005)
From: Thierry Bissonnette
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:02:15 -0500

Sure, but in that case many elements are missing for a definitive selection / critic view. I receive the 42 albums I have as parts of a sentence not yet finished, with a lot of silence and obscure zones between its actual words. Imagine Jandek disappearing without notice and this critic objectivation will forever be impossible, which would suit very much his apparently almost kabbalistic conception of his work : a sentence only available THROUGH its interpretations and reformulations, forever lost and inexact but only so partially remembered and maintained alive.

It sure sounds overly serious, but that’s how I understand the necessity of this jandekian structure to remain open. In that, there would be alot of links to trace with modern music and literature, all those open works – opera operta – which include their listener/reader in the finalization of their nature.

Time to dream more of it…

T.

De : Frank Hardy
Date : Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:10:39 -0800 (PST)
Objet : [******] Re: [Jandek] And the winner is……?!!?! (JANDEK TOP10 2005)

Perhaps, but I still like certains parts of that installation better than others…’tis human nature to be selective, no?

Subject: [Jandek] the whole thing as a holistic revery
From: Gavin
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 03:13:40 +0000

>> above all I’m interested in the
>> whole thing as a holistic revery. Every album has its flaws that become
>> qualities when considering them in the jandekian system. One great
>> installation/composition, not singular albums.

This is how I see the albums as a whole as well…upon discovering Jandek (about five years ago), and also seeing the frightening homogeneity of the entire Jandek corpus, the thing that most struck me was the similarity to how Robert Walser (Swiss prose-poetry writer from the early 20th century, admired by Kafka and Robert Musil, translated into English by Christopher Middleton, Wikipedia entry here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Walser_(writer)) characterises his own work in a passage quoted as a prologue to the translated ‘Selected Stories’:

‘My prose pieces are, to my mind, nothing more nor less than parts of a long, plotless realistic story. For me, the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself’ and that the Jandek albums (at least to me) are all chapters in one long ‘book of myself’, ‘a long, plotless realistic story’, that keeps unfolding album by album, and will one day end, and its end will be the culmination of the ‘novel’ of Jandek…obviously there is a lot of personal projection on my part here, but the oft-maligned Irwin Chusid ‘Key Of Z’ essay (my introduction to Jandek) does contain one or two rather crucial details that aren’t often requoted, especially those relating to the seven novel manuscripts that were submitted for publication prior to ‘Ready For The House’

‘but after they’d been rejected by New York publishers, he’d burned the manuscripts’

and later in the essay Chusid says

‘I received one more handwritten note from Corwood, explaining the seven incinerated novels: “Regarding the book burnings…we took the printed matter to the countryside for an unfettered, proper cremation. Stirred into ashes into the ground…the countryside dirt was hungry…”‘

and then the Jandek project was (presumably) undertaken, as if the novel form was not working as the chosen mode of expression, and a new form was needed, this being ‘Ready For The House’ and then everything that followed…that Jandek’s artistic background is literary rather than musical per se, and that a substantial body of work was destroyed (in a similarly-final way to how Harry Partch ditched his ‘formal’ compositional work in the 1920s prior to venturing off onto his own idiosyncratic path) before a completely different form of expression was undertaken says to me that he wasn’t making amateurish-sound blues records (say) for want of anything better to do, or for a lack of intention…it’s this aspect of Jandek that sustains me through the more difficult records, and justifies the need to

>> suffer through something you don’t enjoy

(although there is little Jandek that I find either meaningless or pointless) – my belief has always been that the entire body of work is one long…well, *something*, some kind of artistic form that has neither label nor precedent, like an impressionistic and selective autobiography in regularly-released and homogenous parts…but Jandek’s absence of context, ie. no statement of intent, ever (another pretty-much unprecedented state of affairs in ‘pop’ music, but not uncommon in the ‘art’ world) does mean that the listener can bring pretty much whatever he or she might want to the work, and where one person sees Art, another sees Bluff…nobody at Corwood is going to contradict another we say here, however we judge the work – but the (rather prurient) speculation about Sterling Smith’s health does at least address his mortality, and that this will end, somehow, and sooner rather than later, and if nothing is ever confirmed or denied about ‘artistic intention’ prior to this point, all that will be left will be a genuine enigma, and that’s a real rarity in an age where information about anything or anyone else is more readily accessible than at any other time in human history…

Gavin

Subject: [Jandek] Jandek as the Hunger Artist
From: Gavin
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 14:48:14 +0000

>> My theory on why Jandek came out of hiding is this: he’s getting older now,
>> he has assumedly retired, and got an offer to play that that Instal festival at
>> around the same time as the documentary was coming out. Perhaps he figured
>> simply figured that now was a better time than ever. One can interpret the
>> CDs he has put out in the last few years as indicative of some kind of a change
>> within him-worthless recluse, the end of it all-and perhaps he found his
>> enigma to be too stifling and decided to put himself in an uncomfortable situation
>> and use his art as a means of betterment as opposed to a narration of his
>> inner struggles. The issue of his frailty reminds me a bit of Kafka’s the
>> Hunger Artist. Hell, in my imagination, Jandek IS a lot like the central
>> character to that story: his art is informed by his lack of comfort with aspects of
>> the world that so many people are able to navigate with such apparent ease.
>> Maybe he’s finally decided to step out of the cage and have a taste….

This reads to me like a very valid observation – Jandek as the Hunger Artist seems so applicable, and Kafka is another author who is all of his own protagonists, and who is endlessly rewriting the same story – Jandek and Kafka share the obvious obtuseness, but more importantly the drivenness, the *need* to create, to express the narrative as poetically or prosaically as is necessary, but to get it out ‘as a means of betterment’ – the original Trubee Spin article references a ’spirituality’ that seems very important to Jandek, and the Jandek On Corwood filmmakers use this discussion as the culmination of the film – I think that Jandek shares this concern with Kafka, with what meaning a person’s life has, with all of its vicissitudes, its successes and failures, the fraility of human life in the face of an unspecified Eternal (Max Brod’s original critical context for Kafka’s postumous publication was Christian rather than ‘postmodern’) …I think that the live performances are a part of a crucial change in the Jandek working method, and while he may be ’stepping out of the cage’, I don’t think he will stay out of the cage forever.

This is a far more productive consideration of the nature of how the inevitability of mortality will effect Jandek than any speculation about his health – some people found the WFMU snapshot as ‘intrusive’, but debate in a public forum about whether someone is dying is rather more intrusive…Christ, we’re all going to die – it’s one of the few absolute guarantees life has to offer…but to be able to leave something of substance behind must be in part what (consciously or unconsciously) informs artists and their work – and Jandek has made it all available, whereas, had Kafka had his wish, Max Brod would have burnt everything, and this comparison could probably never have been made…

Gavin

Subject: [Jandek] Connors interview & Jandek tribute
From: Seth Tisue
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 12:26:28 -0600

Perfect Sound Forever has a new Jandek tribute online:

http://www.furious.com/perfect/jandek/

Most significantly, it includes a new interview with Loren Connors about playing with Jandek. While it’s not very long, Connors still says much more than any of Jandek’s other collaborators have gone on record with.

Aaron Goldberg reviews every Jandek album (except Khartoum) on a scale from SHIT to MASTERPIECE.

And there are two show reviews, one Austin, one Brooklyn. Nothing particularly new in either of them. Re: the Brooklyn review, I sent the editor the following:

The NYC live review is unworthy of your publication. If this feature is a Jandek “tribute”, then why is one of its major sections an ignorant, immature, and cruel live review, which is neither amusing, nor interesting, nor insightful, nor original, nor well written?

Would you do that to another artist featured in your magazine and then call it a “tribute”? Perhaps you should call the feature something else. I suggest “Open Season on Jandek”, or maybe “Jandek: The Small-Minded Weigh In”.

I’m being “snarky”. I hear it’s the in thing. How am I doing?

Subject: Re: [Jandek] Time delays and death thoughts
From: Seth Tisue
Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:31:47 -0600

>>>>>>>>>> “Frank” == Frank Hardy writes:

Frank> so it makes sense that a picture of him where he looks like he’s
Frank> in his forties would have been taken in the 80’s, and lo, the
Frank> evidence stands up. The Jandek in Trubee’s 1985 interview was 40
Frank> years old, and his voice sounds much more like the one that
Frank> first surfaced on Put My Dream on this Planet- gruffer, more
Frank> used, but the same guy. And the Jandek who comes out and
Frank> performs nowadays sounds even older than this guy. So the
Frank> records seem to be on a ten to fiteen year time delay

I’ve always assumed that Lost Cause was the last album of vault-digging, and that since Twelfth Apostle, the albums are being released more or less as they are recorded. The sharp stylistic division between everything up to Lost Cause and everything after leads me to believe that he didn’t record anything for some years.

This theory could be consistent with Jandek’s transition from the machinist job (Trubee interview) to the office job (Vine interview); maybe he wasn’t making music during those years (roughly circa 1985-1995)?

Frank> I’d guess that the stuff he’s putting out now is from the early
Frank> 90’s

I hear no real difference between how he’s playing and singing live right now and the records that are coming out; they seem very much the same to me musically, vocally, and lyrically. What makes you think there’s still much lag between recording and release…?

Oh and by the way has anyone else wondered if the early acoustic albums were actually recorded after the “mid-period” electric blues stuff? Those albums have such a strong circa-1970 vibe that I find it difficult to imagine them being recorded in a later time period. I imagine it like this: the acoustic stuff is circa late seventies; after he started getting some response to those LP releases he started digging through older tapes looking for stuff to release, from when he was younger and running with the crowd that helped make the records. This could help explain the rehearsal/jam-session, never-intended-for-release feel of a lot of the Jandek/Nancy stuff; that stuff is also the kind of thing people tend to do when they’re 25 and not when they’re 40.

All of this is just speculation, of course — the real story could be very different. I’m saying what feels most likely to me.

Tim, re: your concerns about the 1945 birth year, it’s true that I’d always assumed more like 1950 or even 1955 based on the cover photos, until we found out about the copyright records. (And you can probably put whatever info you want when you send in the copyright forms [Trubee interview], although putting down fake information doesn’t seem to me like a Corwood kind of thing to do.) Because of the cover photos you mention, but also because of the Follow Your Footsteps cover. Doesn’t he look under 18? And doesn’t the photo look like late 1960’s and not early 1960’s? It’s easy to forget how conservative boys’ and men’s hair styles were in this country before the Beatles came along in 1964. And how about that guitar — it also seems like a late-sixties, post-Beatles thing. And doesn’t it look like mom’s basement? Who knows, maybe he’s in his early to mid twenties there and that particular photo just happens to make him look younger. As for the White Box Requiem and The Door Behind covers though, I don’t think you need to assume 1975 for those — there were plenty of people walking around looking like that by 1970 (and even earlier). If “30ish” is hard to believe, perhaps 25ish is easier.

This stuff about Jandek being fatally ill should be disregarded as hearsay, I think. Read the (partial) lyrics to The Cell. I’ve said this before, but it sounds to me like he was very seriously ill (and that jibes with his current thinness), but has recovered. I don’t have any inside info, but my gut feeling is he’ll be with us for a while yet.
I hope I’m right.

Subject: [Jandek] Time delays and death thoughts
From: graeme
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:44:35 +0100

I think you could be right about the mid period stuff with collaborators. Even if it wasn’t recorded before his first records, it seems like there was a long(ish) delay in releasing it, judging from the letter to Irwin Chusid in Dec 82 quoted in the collaborators part of this website.

In it, Jandek refers to Nancy, John etc in the past tense, which implies that he’s no longer working (or even in contact with them). Referring to Nancy as a ‘hillbilly type’ also seems a bit derogatory – maybe they fell out?

But he also mentions having already recorded lots more electric stuff with Nancy singing and the other collaborators – and I’m sure none of this was released (or even close to being released) at the time he wrote that letter.

Subject: [Jandek] Jandek at The Gone Wait, Berlin
From: Claus Moser
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:23:34 +0100

Hi there,

I guess this hasn’t been posted so far: The Berlin Biennale features a group exhibition called “The Gone Wait??? – this is most probably the ???special about Jandek’s cover art??? which Jungle mentioned in his review of the Belgium concert.

>From the press blurb:

—————————
The Gone Wait

Curated by Tobias Buche

Gagosian Gallery
AUGUSTSTRASSE 50A
10119 BERLIN
TEL 030 28879069
FAX 030 24345988
GAGOSIAN@BERLINBIENNALE.DE
TUE-SAT 12-18 h
Opening reception: November 28, 7–9 pm
Exhibition dates: November 29 – December 31, 2005

J. Depp, Gibson Haynes, John Frusciante, Rainald Goetz, Jacob Holdt, Jandek, Josef Kramhöller, Kitty Kraus, Jonas Lippsm, Josef Strau, Herbert Volkmann, Maximilian Zentz Zlomovitz

The exhibition “The Gone Wait??? presents artworks and documents by writers, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists who, consciously or unconsciously, address both literal and metaphorical acts of vanishing and escaping reality or the socialized world.

The show includes various representations of isolation or extrication with a hallucinatory exploration of impenetrable locations both physical and psychological. Author or subject, academic or visionary, documentary or fictional—these dichotomies become obscured or insignificant in the works presented here.

The diverse, yet heavily autobiographical approaches taken by the artists included in the show often elude categorization and are difficult to describe or put into words. The exhibition title, “The Gone Wait,??? borrowed from Jandek’s 2003 album of the same name, makes no immediate sense, but implies a feeling much like that of being alone or removed from civilization. Jandek, represent the simultaneous production of absence and presence with his self-portrait album covers.

[and, more specifically on Jandek:]

Until a few months ago, the Texan musician Jandek had never performed live and generally avoided any kind of public appearance, still he has built up a strong, cultish following, recording over 40 albums which he distributes via his own label, Corwood Industries. His simultaneous presence and absence exemplified by his album covers, reveals aspects of the elusive phantom persona of the artist.
—————————–

The German press text differs slightly from the English version and claims that in his cover design Jandek “is turning around his absence and his disappearance???: “On each of the more than 40 records which have been released until now, [Jandek’s] own persona is present in a shadowy and defensive staging of the self.???

Unfortunately, I noticed this too late, so despite living in Germany I won’t have the time to see the exhibition, but if anybody on the list does, I’d like to hear about it.

By the way, just for the record: This “Gagosian Gallery??? has nothing to do with the original one in the U.K. and U.S., despite the similar looking website (http://www.berlinbiennale.de/gagosian.php?lang=de), this is just some sort of conceptual “guerrilla franchising???.

Best,
claus

Subject: [Jandek] mp3s of Jandek at Instal05 – online
From: Lee Rosevere
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:09:47 -0800 (PST)

Hello all,

In the spirit of sharing this holiday season, I’ve posted Jandek’s Sunday night performance from Instal05 (Oct 16/05) at my blog:

http://fudgeland.blogspot.com/

I’ve also got my top picks of 2005 up there, in case anyone cares to check ‘em out.

Thanks and happy holidays,
~LR

Subject: [Jandek] Berlin exhibit
From: “Martin, HitQuarters”
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:44:56 +0100

Jandek at The Gone Wait, Berlin

I have been there today and it was quite interesting. In one room there were 22 Jandek Vinyl-LP covers on the wall. On the windowsill a CD player with headphones was installed, “Raining Down Diamonds” was playing. Fittet great with the conception of the exhibition. For me, Jandek’s art always had three dimensions. First, of course, the music, then the artwork and last not least the album and song titels, so here it came all together nicely.

I also liked Johnny Depp’s and Gibson Haynes’ “visual journey through the wrecked home/studio of John Frusciante”. It was a tape playing on a TV set in a special room that was seperated from the rest of the gallery by “Hippie-style” fabrics. The camera took long, moving shots of Frusciante’s appartment, almost like a helicopter flight. The place was a total mess and looked like an installation itself. You could hear Frusciante’s music to this through headphones; souded like an experimental soundtrack.

This was also great:
“Josef Strau’s photo series of housing projects that were built during and after the Second World War are reworked with a variety of unconventional materials, such as white correction fluid. He then re-photographs them, making them appear more and more alien and shadowy, until only the outlines remain visible. The series represents an experiment in dissolving and exorcizing subjective experiences.”

They reminded me of some Jandek covers, but they were much more eerie.

I also asked the person from the gallery if he had made contact with Jandek, but he said that all the covers were from Mr. Tisue’s collection. They left Jandek a message on the answering machine, but never heard back and so they hoped he at least doesn’t have anything against it.

Best,
Martin

Subject: [Jandek] Jandek in Avanto
From: Gavin
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:58:42 +0000

There’s another account of the Helsinki performance at

http://foxydigitalis.com/foxyd/feature_detail.php?id=137

with a fantastic photo (sorry if someone has already posted this…)

Gavin

Subject: Re: Subject: Re: [Jandek] Jandek: Tom Petty fan
From: Markus Metsälä
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 20:24:17 +0200

Quoting Ratan X:

>> Yuval Legendtofski wrote:
>>
>> Heh, well, he probably likes a lot of stuff. I can’t imagine too many
>> people in the indie and avant scenes who don’t like cheesy pop as well.

Yeah, apparently so. When he attended the final party of the Avanto Festival here in Helsinki he had commented that the DJ was spinning some good tunes. And at that very moment some sort of breakdance tracks were being played. Or so I’m told. He also said that he hadn’t been to a proper party for ten years, and that he really enjoying himself.

Markus

Has anyone approached Jandek about playing in Australia? If not, then maybe I should…

Eagleton on Bakhtin

Shannon — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 03:08:26 +0000

Mikhail Bakhtin is an important theorist for my PhD, particularly his concepts of hybridity and the dialogic, which are very useful for thinking about appropriation.

I recently purchased Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, the sequel to his classic Literary Theory: An Introduction (probably the most useful book I read as a first year undergrad all those years ago). I decided to reread Literary Theory first and came accross this section on Bakhtin (pp. 116-118):

One of the most important critics of Saussurean linguistics was the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who under the name of his colleague V.N. Voloshinov published in 1929 a pioneering study entitled Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Bakhtin had also been largely responsible for what remains the most cogent critique of Russian Formalism. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, published under the names of Bakhtin and P.N. Medvedev in 1928. Reacting sharply against Saussure’s ‘objectivist’ linguistics, but critical also of ’subjectivist’ alternatives, Bakhtin shifted attention from the abstract system of langue to the concrete utterances of individuals in particular social contexts. Language was to be seen as inherently ‘dialogic’: it could be grasped only in terms of its inevitable orientation towards another. The sign was to be seen less as a fixed unit (like a signal) than as an active component of speech, modified and transformed in meaning by the variable social tones, valuations and connotations it condensed within itself in specific social conditions. Since such valuations and connotations were constantly shifting, since the ‘linguistic community’ was in fact a heterogeneous society composed of many conflicting interests, the sign for Bakhtin was less a neutral element in a given structure than a focus of struggle and contradiction. It was not simply a matter of asking ‘what the sign meant’, but of investigating its varied history, as conflicting social groups, classes, individuals and discourses sought to appropriate it and imbue it with their own meanings. Language, in short, was a field of ideological contention, not a monolithic system; indeed signs were the very material medium of ideology, since without them no values or ideas could exist. Bakhtin respected what might be called the ‘relative autonomy’ of language, the fact that it could not be reduced to a mere reflex of social interests; but he insisted that there was no language that was not caught up in definite social relationships, and that these social relationships were in turn part of broader political, ideological and economic systems. Words were ‘multi-accentual’ rather than frozen in meaning: they were always the words of one particular human subject for another, and this practical context would shape and shift their meaning. Moreover, since all signs were material – quite as material as bodies or automobiles – and since there could be no human consciousness without them, Bakhtin’s theory of language laid the foundations for a materialist theory of consciousness itself. Human consciousness was the subject’s active, material, semiotic intercourse with others, not some sealed interior realm divorced from these relations; consciousness, like language, was both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the subject simultaneously. Language was not to be seen either as ‘expression’, ‘reflection’ or abstract system, but rather as a material means of production, whereby the material body of the sign was transformed through a process of social conflict and dialogue into meaning.

Abandoning Copyright: A Blessing for Artists, Art, and Society

Shannon — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 06:47:57 +0000

Abandoning Copyright: A Blessing for Artists, Art, and Society
By Joost Smiers
de Volkskrant, 26 November 2005

http://www.culturelink.org/news/members/2005/members2005-011.html
(English translation of original article published in Dutch)

Several weeks ago, Carlos Guiterrez, the US Secretary of Commerce, announced a series of initiatives to stamp out the rampant piracy of, among other things, music. Damages resulting from counterfeiting and piracy is estimated to amount to 250 billion dollars annually, in the United States alone. In a press release, he stated, “The protection of intellectual property is vital to our economic growth and global competitiveness and it has major consequences in our ongoing effort to promote security and stability around the world,”

Now I must admit that it never occurred to me that copyright could contribute to global security and stability. This is quite an intriguing message ? and from a US Secretary, at that! Another aspect addressed by Carlos Guiterrez is, however, more obvious. Copyright has increasingly become an instrument for securing huge investments. In the past decade, it has become one of the major driving forces of western economy, and US economy in particular. This development, however, has a major downside: companies owning massive amounts of copyrighted works can, at their whim, ban weaker cultural activities ? not only from the marketplace, but also from the general audience’s attention. This is happening under our very eyes. It is nigh impossible to ignore the blockbuster movies, bestselling books and top-chart records presented to us by these cultural molochs, who, incidentally, own almost every imaginable right to these works. As a result, the most people are completely unaware of all those other, less commercialized activities taking place in music, literature, cinema, theater and other arts. This is a tremendous loss to society, because our democratic world can only truly thrive on a large diversity of freely expressed and discussed cultural expressions.

The common perception is that copyright first and foremost protects the well-being and interests of artists. However, history shows that the first political act somewhat resembling our modern copyright laws already had quite a different objective than safeguarding the artist’s income. The first initiative for protecting the intellectual property of artistic expression was made by Queen Anne in England, who, in 1557, granted the Stationer’s guild a monopoly on printing and publishing books; a monopoly which conveniently banned all competition from printers in other parts, such as other counties, or rival Scotland. In fact, the term “copyright” says it all: it is the exclusive right to copy any particular work; nowhere in early copyright was any mention made of the author or artist who produced the work. Queen Anne had her reasons for installing this copyright. She was not overly fond of the concept of “the free word”, and granting the Stationer’s guild the exclusive right to publishing books gave her full control over which books could be published and which were banned from the market. After all, those who can grant rights, can deny them as well.

This act by Queen Anne is the specter by which copyright is haunted up to this day, and perhaps even more than ever before. Ever smaller numbers of increasingly large and powerful entities own the exclusive rights to ever more works in the fields of literature, cinema, music and graphic arts. For example Bill Gates, widely known as the founder of Microsoft, also owns a rather less known company by the name of Corbis, which collects vast amounts of images from all over the world; together with Getty, Corbis is developing into an oligopolist in the field of photographs and reproductions of paintings ? in other words: an entity which has a large amount of control over the market, just as the Stationer’s guild had in the sixteenth century. The oligopolist has control over which artistic works we may use for which purposes, and under which conditions, in much the same way Queen Anne had control over printed works.

In most cultures around the world, this state of affairs was, and is, highly undesirable, even unthinkable. Artists have always used and built upon other artists’ work to create new works of art. It is hard to imagine indeed that the works of Shakespeare, Bach, and countless others cultural heavyweights could have come into existence without this principle of freely building on the work of predecessors. Yet what do we see happening now? Take, for example, documentary makers, who nowadays face almost insurmountable obstacles, as their work almost inevitably contains fragments of copyrighted pictorial or musical content, the use of which requires both consent from the copyright owner and a fee to be paid. The latter is almost always beyond the documentary maker’s means, and the former gives Bill Gates, or any other copyright owner, full rights to allow the use of “his” artistic content only in a way he deems appropriate. Now where in this scheme of things are our human rights? Human rights should guarantee freedom of communication, and a free exchange of ideas and cultural expressions is what greatly helped build our modern society. This human cultural development will, however, grind to a halt when a mere handful of persons or companies can call themselves “owners” of the majority of pictures and melodies our society has brought forth. This puts them in a position where they alone can dictate whether we can make use of a substantial part of our collective human cultural achievement, and on which terms and conditions. The consequences are detrimental: we are being made speechless; our cultural memory is taken from us and locked away; the development and spread of our cultural identity is stunted, and our imagination is laid in chains by law.

Contrary to what one might expect, the seemingly endless possibilities of copying and sampling using modern digital technologies have so far only aggravated the situation. Publicly offering even a mere second’s worth of copyrighted work will almost certainly attract attention from lawyers on behalf of the “owners” of said material. Sound artists, who used to freely sample work from others to build new musical creations, are now treated as pirates and criminals. Whole copyright enforcement industries have emerged, scouting the digital universe day and night for even the smallest snippet of copyrighted work used by others ? and those found out, often stand to lose literally everything they have.

Copyright has yet another intrinsic fault which makes it difficult to maintain in a democratic society. Copyright nowadays revolves almost exclusively around so-called intellectual property. This is a problem, since the traditional notion of property is largely irreconcilable with intangible concepts such as knowledge and creativity; a tune, an idea or an invention will not lose any of its value or usefulness when it is shared among any number of people. In contrast, a single physical object, such as a chair, quickly becomes less useful when more people want access to it; in this latter case, the term “property” has a clear meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, in the past decades the legal definition of property has been extended way beyond any physical constraints. These days, almost anything can be someone’s property, such as fragrances and colors; even the makeup of the proteins in our blood and the genes in our body cells are being claimed as the exclusive property of one company or another, which can subsequently bar anyone else from using it. It is therefore high time to reconsider the current concept of property.

With regard to artistic works, it is quite conceivable that no single person should have the right to claim exclusive ownership over, say, a particular tune. We all know that almost every work of art, and every invention, is based upon the work of predecessors. Now this doesn’t mean we should have less respect for artists creating new works of art based on the work of others, and we’re obliged to contribute to artists’ well-being and income in our society. Yet rewarding their every single achievement, or reproduction or even interpretation thereof, with a monopoly lasting many decades, is too much, because it leaves nothing for other artists to build on. In fact, even criticizing the artist’s work can become rather hazardous, as it “damages” his “property”. Unpleasant as this sounds, things get even worse when we consider that the vast majority of copyrighted works is owned by a relatively small group of large conglomerates. These mega-industries create, invent or produce nothing at all, yet demand that artists sign over all rights to their works to them, just for the privilege of having their works distributed.

From this point of view, there is ample reason to send our current system of copyright to the scrapheap. Artists will of course feel threatened by such a bold move. After all, without copyright, they will lose all means of existence, now won’t they? Well, not necessarily.

Let’s first look at some numbers. Research by economists shows that only 10 percent of artists collect 90 percent of copyright proceeds, and that the remaining 90 percent of artists must share the remaining 10 percent of proceeds. In other words: for the vast majority of artists, copyright has only marginal financial advantages. Then there’s another peculiar fact: most artists have entered into some sort of covenant with the cultural industry ? as if these two groups have even remotely similar interests! For example GEMA, the German copyright organization, sends approximately 70 percent of copyright proceeds abroad, mostly to the US, where several of the world’s biggest cultural conglomerates reside. In this process, the average artist is nowhere to be seen.

What is called for, is a way to ensure that artists can make a fair income from their work, without the risk of being pushed out of the market and the larger audience’s attention by the cultural industry’s marketing power. This may sound rather idealistic, and perhaps somewhat unrealistic, but society’s need for cultural diversity should not be underestimated.

The interesting thing is that it is quite feasible for artists to thrive without copyright. After all, copyright is simply a protective layer of armor around a work of art ? and the question is whether the benefits of this protection outweigh its drawbacks. Artists, and their agents and producers are entrepreneurs. What then justifies the fact that their work receives vastly more protection ? i.e. long-term monopolistic control over their work ? than the work of other entrepreneurs? Why can’t they simply offer their work on the free market, and try to attract buyers?

Let’s try to predict what would happen if copyright were abolished. One of the first effects would be intriguing: All of a sudden, it would be no longer interesting for large cultural industries to focus so heavily on bestselling books, blockbuster movies and superstars. If, in the absence of copyright and intellectual property, these works can be freely enjoyed and exchanged by anyone, the cultural industry giants lose their exclusive rights to works of art. As a result, they will also lose their dominating market position which keeps so many other artists out of sight. The market would become normalized, which would enable more artists to show their work, make themselves known, and make a fair income from what they produce. This income initially results from being the first in the market with a specific work. But there’s another factor contributing to the artists’ success. A more normalized cultural marketplace will offer more artists an opportunity to build a reputation, like a brand name, which can subsequently be exploited to sell more works at a higher price. Rapid and widespread copying of an artist’s work, only possible in this digital age, may indeed decrease its market value, but will only serve to increase the artist’s reputation. This gives more artists an opportunity to keep selling their works to a larger audience than the current, industry-controlled distribution model.

Obviously, abandoning copyright raises several important questions which need resolving, and three major adjustments in particular are called for. The first issue is that the production of an artistic work sometimes involves a significant investment in time and/or money. This would require legal protection for a short period of time, such as a year in the case of literature or cinema, during which the artist can exclusively reap the benefits from his work. This usufruct, however is different from current practice, as the work will automatically enter into the public domain after completion ? as was customary in nearly all cultures before our current intellectual property laws.

The question of course is, why specifically a year, and no longer? Experience shows that the economically viable life span of the majority of works is a year or less. After this period, producing and distributing the same work is no longer interesting for other parties anyhow, because lots of others could do the same, which makes the investment unprofitable. An obvious consequence of all this is that there can be no more illegal use of works of art ? at least outside the protection time span ? since the material in question is no longer owned by any one party. Piracy will mostly be a thing of the past, as will criminalizing and pursuing people who share and distribute works of art, e.g. those who share music via the Internet.

The second obvious problem is that many works of art may not yield any profit in a free market for some time, or at least not within the proposed protection time span of one year. This may happen when a particular work remains “undiscovered” by the major audience. Still, it is important for society that a large diversity of works of art is available for public enjoyment and discussion. Also, artists must have the opportunity to develop their work, even when these are not directly interesting to the market at large. The development of an artist’s skills and personal style often takes a lot of time, yet it is in the interest of society as a whole to invest in this development. For these and other reasons society has an obligation to support the creation of these works of art by means of subsidies or other support models.

The third issue concerns the whole of the cultural market place. Abandoning copyright would remove one major support from under the dominance of our current cultural industries, but this does not necessarily mean that their dominance would end. Established industries would still hold the means to large-scale production, distribution and marketing of cultural goods and services in a firm grip; this is one of the reasons for their current success: keeping total control over artistic works from the source to the end consumer, and this distribution model is what largely determines which films, books, theater productions and image materials we can enjoy.

This concentration of power is undesirable in every branch of industry, but it is particularly detrimental in the cultural field. We could therefore imagine that the cultural market be subjected to a kind of competitive law with a strong cultural bias. This relates among other things to ownership of means of production and distribution of cultural goods. Also, legislation may be called for to force large cultural enterprises to (re)present all of the actual cultural diversity being created by both local and foreign artists. This model would make a world without copyright not just perfectly imaginable, but also profitable for very many artists, and be a veritable blessing to cultural democracy.

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Joost Smiers is the author of Arts Under Pressure, Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of Globalization, and a professor of political science of the arts in the Art and Economics Research Group of the Utrecht School of Arts, in the Netherlands

via nettime

i was in a meeting all day today

Shannon — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:52:29 +0000

and drank too much coffee