Subtext: Tarantino

Tarantino talks about subtext, in his own charmingly offensive way. Not one to watch if easily annoyed by Tarantino.

Scene taken from the film "Sleep with me" (1994).

Time and Moments of Being (and non-being)

Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand - "non-being". Every day includes so much more non-being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in "being". It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; my head was relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger; I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like - there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book - the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette - which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being...[...]...I have never been able to do both. I tried - in Night and Day; and The Years.

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, 'Sketch of the Past' (London: Pimlico, 2002), 83-84

Sketch of the Past was written between 1939-40. A way of thinking about time, about moments, about structure. Life, and Life stories (also, my goodness, the semi-colons are amazing! The description of the nodescript cotton wool day activities in particular).

A word is territory shared

'Used well, metaphor and subtext give implied meanings, raise questions, raise the possibility of multiple implications. They are not absolute (symbolism might be), not the putting of a box on a text (or a text in a box), but with this detail and comparison (concrete pressed against the abstract) comes life, possibility, story, motivation. A way to give a story a hunger, while giving a reader a feast. '

EKR, Metaphor lecture handout.

'What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced , transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.'

Nietzsche.F, The Portable Nietzsche ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin (1954)): 42-47

'...language for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s.'

Bakhtin.M, The Dialogic Imagination: four essays, (Texas: University of Texas Press,(1981)): 293

'... any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorbsion and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.'
Kristeva.Julia, Desire in Language: a semiotic approach to literature and art, (New York: Columbia University Press, (1980)): 66

In thinking and writing about metaphors and subtext this week, I've been rereading around Intertexuality, and those ideas that pretty pop up in everything I write, even if I try to bop them on the head like little bunny foo-foo. The concepts that stick.

'We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture...the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.'
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana, (1977)): 146-7

I am really interested in writing found in public spaces, things like graffiti (which is what I have been, superficially at least, writing about this week). Any writing on the wall makes me think about these core ideas:

'Orientation of the word towards the addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As a word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses 'one' in relation to the 'other'. I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends upon my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, the speaker and his interlocutor.'
Bakhtin/Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, L.Matejka and IR Titunik (trans.) (Harvard University Press (1986)): 95

'..any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualification, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist - or, on the contrary, by the 'light' of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgements and accents. The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value-judgements and accents, and weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile.'
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: four essays, (Texas: University of Texas Press (1981)): 276

Oh - the snail at the top of the page! They were crawling around London in June this year, an artist called Slinkachu used the shells for something called 'Inner City Snail – a slow-moving street art project'. And why not!

Anne Enright: 'the doing is everything'

For a long time, when asked about creative writing courses, I said that no one taught me anything at UEA. This, strictly speaking, was true. I could neither spell nor punctuate when I left, had vague ideas about how a paragraph might be constructed, and I used words like "denouement" with the greatest contempt. At least I had heard them, I suppose. But though I had not been taught anything, I did learn a lot: this is a nice distinction but a crucial one. Writing is learned from the inside out; it is not a subject like geography, that can be doled out in parcels of information. Writing is a discipline and, as with any discipline, whether spiritual or physical, the doing is everything. No one can do it for you.

Great article, you can read the rest here in the Guardian.

Night Thoughts of a nonsense poacher

Being Behind.

O dear

the night goes quickly, as I'm writing and realising how little I know of the necessary poetry it takes to write about life. It will take all night, just to write words acceptably acceptable.

And grasp the task ahead.

1)My three year old nephew called me a 'nonsense poacher' today. Why I am not as articulate as a three year old?

2)On trying to catch up:
"...as soon as I've written a sentence I've already changed my life, or at least added to it, so that it's impossible ever to catch myself up into a state of completeness."
Simon Gray quoted, in yesterdays Guardian Review (I read it today, I'm a bit behind..)

3)Back to the writing!

'Lyric' or 'Word Salad Jazzmatron'?

I am sad, because you can no longer (legally) watch Colbert in Britain. Colbert is illegal! I hate to be forced to nefarious methods to watch his truthiness in action.

In last nights episode (18th November) Colbert interviewed Paul Simon, and they spoke about the perceived inadequacy of the word 'Lyric'...

Stephen Colbert: your new book is entitled Lyrics 1964 to 2008. Now you are undoubtedly one of the great lyricists and really modern poets of America; you couldn't come up with anything better than Lyrics? I mean that's not that imaginative.

Paul Simon: There is a certain zen simplicity to it.

Stephen Colbert: I would have gone with 'Word Salad Jazzmatron". That's a grabber. We call that a grabber, in the business.

Paul Simon: That's why you're you, and I'm not you.

Stephen Colbert: Exactly. Don't feel bad about it, I'm sure you'll find a place.

They return to the topic of Lyrics and writing later -

Stephen Colbert: Which comes first for you, the music or the lyrics?

Paul Simon - Music

Stephen Colbert: - Really?

Paul Simon: Yes, music is first and sometimes rhythm precedes the harmonic part of it, but always the music...well...for the last couple of decades anyway, since Graceland, when I first started to write.

If you are lucky enough to live in America, you can look at the interview here.

George Lakoff: Moral Politics and Metaphorical Thought

'Don't think about elephants!'

Well worth a listen if you have some time to spare. Lakoff (professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley) speaks well here, about metaphorical thought and language.

Stephen Pinker: Is 'liberal' a swear word..?

Steven Pinker talked about political rhetoric on 12th September 2008.

'...words gain or lose strong emotional colourings.'

The Politics of Elitist Language

Author Susan Jacoby criticises the degeneration of language within politics and the use of "folks" in the 2008 United States primary debates.

Have a read of this Andy Borowitz article:

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

... Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off."

The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

"Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.

Bad Language

Armstrong and Miller discuss Predictive Text

Comedian Frank Skinner describes his experiments with removing swear words from his act; listen to the interview here;

'...not swearing gave me a cloak of invisibility with which I could pass through middle England unscathed and without offending anyone'

Almost two-fifths of BBC viewers support a total ban on swearing on television, according to a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times, and politicians and senior broadcasting figures such as ITV boss Michael Grade and Sir Terry Wogan have called for TV to clean up its act.

Frank Skinner: I'm actually a massive fan of swearing, I'm not trying to crusade, this is like a field study that I did which I thought was kind of interesting..

Interviewer - When is swearing good?

Frank Skinner: It all operates on instincts, and I think comics and writers need to work that out cos there are some jokes where its just kind of perfect really, and it needs the swearing. You know, Chaucer used swearing, its a very time honoured language part, and it shouldn't be ghettoised the way it is just because some people don't like it.

Interviewer: So are you with those who say, 'Television needs to clean up, we need to not have so much swearing'?

Frank Skinner: I think its not about cleaning up. First of all I don't want people using so much swearing there's a blanket ban, because there then won't be any room for the clever swearing, the beautiful, eloquent swearing. So I think we need to back off a bit on the stuff that's not necessary, but I do think its absolutely important that we keep swearing as a tool, for comic television, and any other area of comedy.

Adapting, altering, shifting

Topologies. They’re adapting, altering, shifting, all the time. Stillness is for dead people, for the canon
EKR