How to Draw "Midnight Kittycan":
How to Draw "Midnight Kangaroose":
Friday, April 17, 2020
How to Draw Hatchimals!
Hatchimals (by FIMLP)
How to Draw "Midnight Kittycan":
How to Draw "Midnight Kangaroose":
How to Draw "Midnight Kittycan":
How to Draw "Midnight Kangaroose":
Sunday, July 07, 2019
I am in fact still around...
I haven't posted here for quite a while, and I had the biggest of plans when I was. I was hoping to transcribe and post poetry from Charlotte Mason on a more regular schedule (and I just might), but that project has been on hold for a while. Part of the reason was because of a book on a small Irish band called U2. But that's done now, and I was tired of seeing the CM heading that's been at the top of this blog for a couple of years.
In case you were interested in an update, I have been appointed Registrar at my university, and I remain a member of the Faculty (it will be a challenge to balance those two roles). And the book on U2 has been submitted and is ready for publication (as far as I know). It'll be out later in 2019.
That is the end of this update. I will consider what to do with this blog, and whether I should keep it up at all. Thanks for reading anyway!
In case you were interested in an update, I have been appointed Registrar at my university, and I remain a member of the Faculty (it will be a challenge to balance those two roles). And the book on U2 has been submitted and is ready for publication (as far as I know). It'll be out later in 2019.
That is the end of this update. I will consider what to do with this blog, and whether I should keep it up at all. Thanks for reading anyway!
Monday, November 20, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "LIX 'Little children abide in Him'" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
[p164]
LIX
“Little children abide in Him” (The Disciple)
“I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the
Father.”
“I write unto you, little children, because your sins are for-
given you for His name’s sake.”
“And now, little children, abide in Him.”
YE children, unto you I write:
Not strong to overcome are ye,
Faithful to strive nor wise to flee;—
But your weak coming was in Light!
Ye see; though not your feeble thought
Can shape the knowledge Light has brought,
Yet have ye known the Father long from wisdom
hid.
An older breast with pity swells
For babe in this rude world bereft
Of parent love, all des’late left!
Uncareful and at ease he dwells;
He knows, yet knows not that he knows,
A care that bears him as he goes,—
The Father he discerns and smiles all fears
amid!
[p165]
And, children, unto you I write!
Ah, not the shining of His face
Nor shelt’ring of the Father’s grace
Has kept your garments wholly white:
Poor babes, ye sin—for strong is ill,
And small your might and weak your will—
Lo, swift forgiveness lifts anew to His embrace!
For not on you the burden lies:
A gracious cloud, a tender tear,
Is all ye know of hireling fear;
Then into joy again do rise:
E’en while ye sin, are ye forgiven
For His Name’s sake: wherefore in heaven
Your angels evermore behold your Father’s face.
For, ah, wise little ones, ye know
To take the Off’ring at the door,
Nor question aught nor tell the score,
But enter, free as winds that blow!
Wherefore, O little ones, I write
That ye do keep you in the light—
For loving must ye be, O children of His grace!
LIX
“Little children abide in Him” (The Disciple)
“I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the
Father.”
“I write unto you, little children, because your sins are for-
given you for His name’s sake.”
“And now, little children, abide in Him.”
YE children, unto you I write:
Not strong to overcome are ye,
Faithful to strive nor wise to flee;—
But your weak coming was in Light!
Ye see; though not your feeble thought
Can shape the knowledge Light has brought,
Yet have ye known the Father long from wisdom
hid.
An older breast with pity swells
For babe in this rude world bereft
Of parent love, all des’late left!
Uncareful and at ease he dwells;
He knows, yet knows not that he knows,
A care that bears him as he goes,—
The Father he discerns and smiles all fears
amid!
[p165]
And, children, unto you I write!
Ah, not the shining of His face
Nor shelt’ring of the Father’s grace
Has kept your garments wholly white:
Poor babes, ye sin—for strong is ill,
And small your might and weak your will—
Lo, swift forgiveness lifts anew to His embrace!
For not on you the burden lies:
A gracious cloud, a tender tear,
Is all ye know of hireling fear;
Then into joy again do rise:
E’en while ye sin, are ye forgiven
For His Name’s sake: wherefore in heaven
Your angels evermore behold your Father’s face.
For, ah, wise little ones, ye know
To take the Off’ring at the door,
Nor question aught nor tell the score,
But enter, free as winds that blow!
Wherefore, O little ones, I write
That ye do keep you in the light—
For loving must ye be, O children of His grace!
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "LVI 'Lest we cause them to stumble'" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
[p153]
LVI
“Lest we cause then to stumble”
SILENT and sorrowful the Company went,
Pondering the Master’s word with sinking hearts
And tardy comprehension. Once again,
Their steps turned to Capernaum, the blessed,
And the Lord made His abode in Peter’s house,
High honoured to receive Him; where was she
Late raised by Christ, His grace, from fevered
bed,
Who would fain speak her love in household
cares:
Did the Lord comfort there the sorrowing Twelve,
Or sat they there with Him, as those men of old
Sate silent with stricken Job?
Peter went forth
And was accosted by those men sent out
To gather from Israelites that Temple due
The legal half a shekel. “Doth not your Lord
Contribute to the general fund?” they ask,
Surmising that, perchance, for cause unknown
He might refuse this service to religion.
[p154]
“He doth,” said Peter, knowing well his Lord
Neglected no observance that became
A pious Jew. But th’ Saint went home per-
plexed,—
Now where should he a shekel find? Full well
He knew that Christ no money owned—though
He,
The Son of God most high! Entering the house
With anxious brow, the Lord discerns his care,—
Speaks first to him, or e’er he told a word:—
“What think’st thou, Simon, of whom do kings
take toll,
From their own sons, or from the subject-folk,
The strangers, not their kin, o’er whom they
rule?”
“Why, sure, from strangers.” “Therefore,” saith
the Lord,
“The King’s own sons go free and share that
State
The tributes of the people must support.”
Did Peter understand how the Lord had said,—
These Temple-dues are for God’s worship paid,
That th’ beauty of holiness may be set forth
By outward symbols in the Temple: See,
I and the Father are one; that worship paid
By pious souls to God, is paid to Me—
One with the Father, sharing all His dues:
Is’t fit that I contribute toward those rites
Ye Jews pay punctual to God—and Me?
[p155]
“But we may not impede these men in their
task,
Nor give them cause for anger or harsh words,
Misjudging thee and Me: so their offence
Were laid at our door who had made them sin:—
Go thou to Gennesareth and cast a hook;
Draw the first fish to land, nor pause to ask
Is’t small or great; when thou hast ope’d his
mouth,
A shekel thou shalt find; that take and pay
To the men—just Temple-dues for thee and Me.”
A PDF is available here.
LVI
“Lest we cause then to stumble”
SILENT and sorrowful the Company went,
Pondering the Master’s word with sinking hearts
And tardy comprehension. Once again,
Their steps turned to Capernaum, the blessed,
And the Lord made His abode in Peter’s house,
High honoured to receive Him; where was she
Late raised by Christ, His grace, from fevered
bed,
Who would fain speak her love in household
cares:
Did the Lord comfort there the sorrowing Twelve,
Or sat they there with Him, as those men of old
Sate silent with stricken Job?
Peter went forth
And was accosted by those men sent out
To gather from Israelites that Temple due
The legal half a shekel. “Doth not your Lord
Contribute to the general fund?” they ask,
Surmising that, perchance, for cause unknown
He might refuse this service to religion.
[p154]
“He doth,” said Peter, knowing well his Lord
Neglected no observance that became
A pious Jew. But th’ Saint went home per-
plexed,—
Now where should he a shekel find? Full well
He knew that Christ no money owned—though
He,
The Son of God most high! Entering the house
With anxious brow, the Lord discerns his care,—
Speaks first to him, or e’er he told a word:—
“What think’st thou, Simon, of whom do kings
take toll,
From their own sons, or from the subject-folk,
The strangers, not their kin, o’er whom they
rule?”
“Why, sure, from strangers.” “Therefore,” saith
the Lord,
“The King’s own sons go free and share that
State
The tributes of the people must support.”
Did Peter understand how the Lord had said,—
These Temple-dues are for God’s worship paid,
That th’ beauty of holiness may be set forth
By outward symbols in the Temple: See,
I and the Father are one; that worship paid
By pious souls to God, is paid to Me—
One with the Father, sharing all His dues:
Is’t fit that I contribute toward those rites
Ye Jews pay punctual to God—and Me?
[p155]
“But we may not impede these men in their
task,
Nor give them cause for anger or harsh words,
Misjudging thee and Me: so their offence
Were laid at our door who had made them sin:—
Go thou to Gennesareth and cast a hook;
Draw the first fish to land, nor pause to ask
Is’t small or great; when thou hast ope’d his
mouth,
A shekel thou shalt find; that take and pay
To the men—just Temple-dues for thee and Me.”
A PDF is available here.
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "VI The miracle of increase" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
VI The miracle of increase
THAT miracle of increase—what the steps,
And at what moment did the change take place?
Did broken fragments multiply the while—
The instant’s space—they passed through Jesus’
hands?
The Disciples’ baskets—were they straightway
filled
Direct from the hands of the Lord? Or, grew
the store
In the act of giving, each portion leaving more
Than itself to fill its place? Idle, we ask;
Who tells us how the goodly grain is built,—
The seed, the blade, the ear, full corn in ear—
That man knows th’ processes of miracles,
How thousands may be fed, how tempests, stilled!
Such mysteries, they yield all to one key
Had we the wit to know it, grace to use:
Life feeds upon the living—all we know!
“In Him was life”—our sum of knowledge, see;
No further oracle’s vouchsafed to men
For all their restless searching, arrogant boasts:
That secret place where life doth hide itself
And thence flows forth to animate the worlds—
Rejecting Christ, THE LIFE, what hope have we
That any find it for us? Alternative,
There’s none for us: ’tis Christ, or blank dismay!
As General spies weak point in his defence,
So Christ took His disciples, constraining them,
By force of that strong word they knew t’obey,
Despite their protestations—sure, not they
Would leave Him all alone to deal with this
Tumultuous multitude!—and, straight, they go,
Take boat as they are bid for further side;
And Christ, alone, took leave of all the folk,
Dispersed them to their homes, constrained by
that
Authority in Him which some knew to name.
And was the Christ alone? Two years had
passed
Since in the wilderness one came and said,—
“The Kingdoms shall be thine and all their praise
Wilt thou but bow to me!” Two strenuous
years,
The Lord had carried water in a sieve,
Had urged great boulder up a mountainous slope;
The inconstant people slipped away from Him;
Fast as He raised them, fell to lower depth:
Is any toil like his who high ideal
Urges incessant on unwilling souls?
What if, once more, the Tempter came and
mocked;—
“Two years gone by—no Kingdom yet to
show!”
What if he urged, “Nay, try my readier plan,—
Let them make King of Thee, and all the gifts
Which Thou wouldst give to men shall flow from
Thee!”
What if stress of temptation drove our Lord,
That He clomb up the mountain there to pray!—
And peace attends His prayer, and careful love.
The Lord gazed from His height; quick flash
revealed
The Disciples toiling on uneasy sea—
Sight piteous out of the dark, their boat a toy,
A plaything of strong waves, tempestuous winds:
The men distressed with rowing make no way;
In the fourth watch of the night, there were they
still!
“Anon, the Lord was with us, safe were we
’Mid all the turmoil of wild heavens, great seas!
Alone, we perish, late so full of hope!”
What greater strait might be—alone, in the
night,
Peril of death about them, without hope?
But what is this adds horror to their dread—
Better to drown than demons see abroad
Walking the midnight sea! Spectre abhorred,
They’d heard how such appeared to men fore-
doomed,
And terror froze their hands to idle oars!
The Shape draws near—a likeness grows on
them;
More awful fear appals: then,—Is it He,
The Spirit of their Master? He is dead,
And they, indeed, left orphaned, desolate!—
They cried aloud in terror; worse than all,
This apparition unendurable!
A tender voice bids all their fears subside—
They hear through the tempest’s raging, “It is I;
Be of good cheer poor troubled hearts, nor
fear!”
Too much the joy for Peter, sudden induced
On anguish of his terror:—Lost he his wits,
And cried, “Lord, bid me come if it be
Thou!”
Hazards of faith are welcome to the Lord,
If so be, He must reckless zeal instruct
Which counts not the cost. “Come,’ saith Christ,
and he came,
Stepped from the boat with eye fixed on the
Lord,
And steady walked the waters: then, distract,
He saw the heaving sea; “I perish, Lord,
Save Thou!” Immediately the Lord stretched
hand,
Took hold of the sinking saint, and spake re-
proof,—
“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst doubt?”
They in the boat knew all their fears subside;
That dear familiar voice quick calmed their soul;—
How awful the surroundings, here was Christ,
And willingness took the place of shrinking
dread:
Glad, they in the boat received Him; subsided
straight
The fury of the storm: those weary leagues
Their sore-tired arms must row were over-past,
In the haven where they would be, were they
now!
Once more they worshipped Him;—“By this
we know
Of a truth, our Lord, Thou art the Son of God!”
The Lord, too, was He weary? What confi-
dence,
The loaves, had they produced in hardened
hearts
Which had no faith in Him when terror urged?
A PDF is available here.
THAT miracle of increase—what the steps,
And at what moment did the change take place?
Did broken fragments multiply the while—
The instant’s space—they passed through Jesus’
hands?
The Disciples’ baskets—were they straightway
filled
Direct from the hands of the Lord? Or, grew
the store
In the act of giving, each portion leaving more
Than itself to fill its place? Idle, we ask;
Who tells us how the goodly grain is built,—
The seed, the blade, the ear, full corn in ear—
That man knows th’ processes of miracles,
How thousands may be fed, how tempests, stilled!
Such mysteries, they yield all to one key
Had we the wit to know it, grace to use:
Life feeds upon the living—all we know!
“In Him was life”—our sum of knowledge, see;
No further oracle’s vouchsafed to men
For all their restless searching, arrogant boasts:
That secret place where life doth hide itself
And thence flows forth to animate the worlds—
Rejecting Christ, THE LIFE, what hope have we
That any find it for us? Alternative,
There’s none for us: ’tis Christ, or blank dismay!
As General spies weak point in his defence,
So Christ took His disciples, constraining them,
By force of that strong word they knew t’obey,
Despite their protestations—sure, not they
Would leave Him all alone to deal with this
Tumultuous multitude!—and, straight, they go,
Take boat as they are bid for further side;
And Christ, alone, took leave of all the folk,
Dispersed them to their homes, constrained by
that
Authority in Him which some knew to name.
And was the Christ alone? Two years had
passed
Since in the wilderness one came and said,—
“The Kingdoms shall be thine and all their praise
Wilt thou but bow to me!” Two strenuous
years,
The Lord had carried water in a sieve,
Had urged great boulder up a mountainous slope;
The inconstant people slipped away from Him;
Fast as He raised them, fell to lower depth:
Is any toil like his who high ideal
Urges incessant on unwilling souls?
What if, once more, the Tempter came and
mocked;—
“Two years gone by—no Kingdom yet to
show!”
What if he urged, “Nay, try my readier plan,—
Let them make King of Thee, and all the gifts
Which Thou wouldst give to men shall flow from
Thee!”
What if stress of temptation drove our Lord,
That He clomb up the mountain there to pray!—
And peace attends His prayer, and careful love.
The Lord gazed from His height; quick flash
revealed
The Disciples toiling on uneasy sea—
Sight piteous out of the dark, their boat a toy,
A plaything of strong waves, tempestuous winds:
The men distressed with rowing make no way;
In the fourth watch of the night, there were they
still!
“Anon, the Lord was with us, safe were we
’Mid all the turmoil of wild heavens, great seas!
Alone, we perish, late so full of hope!”
What greater strait might be—alone, in the
night,
Peril of death about them, without hope?
But what is this adds horror to their dread—
Better to drown than demons see abroad
Walking the midnight sea! Spectre abhorred,
They’d heard how such appeared to men fore-
doomed,
And terror froze their hands to idle oars!
The Shape draws near—a likeness grows on
them;
More awful fear appals: then,—Is it He,
The Spirit of their Master? He is dead,
And they, indeed, left orphaned, desolate!—
They cried aloud in terror; worse than all,
This apparition unendurable!
A tender voice bids all their fears subside—
They hear through the tempest’s raging, “It is I;
Be of good cheer poor troubled hearts, nor
fear!”
Too much the joy for Peter, sudden induced
On anguish of his terror:—Lost he his wits,
And cried, “Lord, bid me come if it be
Thou!”
Hazards of faith are welcome to the Lord,
If so be, He must reckless zeal instruct
Which counts not the cost. “Come,’ saith Christ,
and he came,
Stepped from the boat with eye fixed on the
Lord,
And steady walked the waters: then, distract,
He saw the heaving sea; “I perish, Lord,
Save Thou!” Immediately the Lord stretched
hand,
Took hold of the sinking saint, and spake re-
proof,—
“O thou of little faith, wherefore didst doubt?”
They in the boat knew all their fears subside;
That dear familiar voice quick calmed their soul;—
How awful the surroundings, here was Christ,
And willingness took the place of shrinking
dread:
Glad, they in the boat received Him; subsided
straight
The fury of the storm: those weary leagues
Their sore-tired arms must row were over-past,
In the haven where they would be, were they
now!
Once more they worshipped Him;—“By this
we know
Of a truth, our Lord, Thou art the Son of God!”
The Lord, too, was He weary? What confi-
dence,
The loaves, had they produced in hardened
hearts
Which had no faith in Him when terror urged?
A PDF is available here.
Saturday, October 21, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "V The people would make Him king" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
V The people would make Him king
“HERE’S of a truth that Prophet of the Lord
Moses foretold should lead the folk like him,
Like him, give bread to spare in the wilderness!”
So spake all they who heard what Christ had
done:
Full well they spake; who knows to open wide
Men’s mouths with hunger, knows straightway
to drop
Food that shall animate or fainting flesh,
Or heart sunk low in courage; to give new life
To all the failing goodness of a soul,—
He, Prophet of the World! the One who sees,—
Knows all the needs of men, and ministers!
“This Prophet be our King!” they cry them
hoarse,
Allured by the hope of bread for men spread
thick
As manna in the barren wilderness!
What need to labour? All should sit at ease;
His bread provided, each himself should please!
“Why, what’s a King for but his people’s bread
To furnish, liberal, constant: this is He!
Unwilling, He hangs back, but we are strong,
The many people, sure, may make their King!”
And hot, impetuous, by one impulse moved,
They came perforce to seize and make Him
King!
The disciples stood exultant, from their eyes
Encouragement spake out; all the mad crowd
Knew them supported by these grave good men.
A PDF is available here.
“HERE’S of a truth that Prophet of the Lord
Moses foretold should lead the folk like him,
Like him, give bread to spare in the wilderness!”
So spake all they who heard what Christ had
done:
Full well they spake; who knows to open wide
Men’s mouths with hunger, knows straightway
to drop
Food that shall animate or fainting flesh,
Or heart sunk low in courage; to give new life
To all the failing goodness of a soul,—
He, Prophet of the World! the One who sees,—
Knows all the needs of men, and ministers!
“This Prophet be our King!” they cry them
hoarse,
Allured by the hope of bread for men spread
thick
As manna in the barren wilderness!
What need to labour? All should sit at ease;
His bread provided, each himself should please!
“Why, what’s a King for but his people’s bread
To furnish, liberal, constant: this is He!
Unwilling, He hangs back, but we are strong,
The many people, sure, may make their King!”
And hot, impetuous, by one impulse moved,
They came perforce to seize and make Him
King!
The disciples stood exultant, from their eyes
Encouragement spake out; all the mad crowd
Knew them supported by these grave good men.
A PDF is available here.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "IV Christ our 'Providence'" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
IV Christ our “Providence”
“Now make them all sit down:” and that same
John,
Who splendours saw of the new Jerusalem,
The rainbow throne, the sardius, emerald,—
Here, also, saw what fed his artist-eye;—
Saw much grass in the place; the vivid-hued
Garments of eastern men amongst the flowers,—
Kaleidoscope of colours: soon, the word
Came, bidding all to sit by companies;
See, a score of open squares, with space in midst
Where Christ stood with th’ disciples, and that
meal—
The little meal which should sustain them all—
Mocking the eyes of thousand hungry folk
Thus bidden to break fast! Did any know
With soft assurance in his inward heart
That, the thing He gives sufficeth, less or more?
How good to us, anhungered, to perceive
The Master’s mind disclosed in all the tale,
See order emanating from His act
As song from throat of throstle! so did John see
A jewelled glory as of painted glass
Reflected on his vision from Christ’s thought! —
How good to see our Saviour in the midst
Dealing out bread to all that multitude
E’en as He deals to us in harvest field!
The harvest’s yellow glory in all lands,
In Egypt, Syria, distant western fields,
The table spread for us as for the birds,—
How this one scene interprets the Lord’s ways!
Lo, that large circle, those five thousand souls,
Raised eyes to Him in their midst; He took the
loaves,—
The little barley cakes, the fishes two,—
And, looking up to heaven, He blessed the meat
And gave God thanks Who feeds us. That poor
“Grace”
We say before meat,—convicted, we elude
The eye of Him who taught us! Consider we
This feeding of five thousand, and we perceive
How the very life of God comes with our bread!
He brake the loaves and fishes, gave the meat
To the disciples, they to th’ multitude:—
Behold, our uses! That He hands to us,
For distribution is’t, that all may eat;
We, honoured in His service and in theirs.
The people ate accustomed fare with zest—
The wonder of ’t! And ate the more to try,
Could the supply give out and any lack ?
In time they were all filled; and the ordered
mind
Of Him, the universe sustains and made,
Appeared in a little matter: “Gather up,”
Said He who fed them with unlaboured act,
“The broken pieces left that none be lost.”
No trifling thing, these fragments of men’s
food: —
Organic life alone can life sustain;
Cycles of time, processes manifold,
Initial act creative, evolving care
Of Him who first had made,—all these had gone To make rejected crust, fragment of fish:
And those twelve baskets filled with broken
meat,
Of God’s world-providence tell all the tale!
A PDF is available here.
“Now make them all sit down:” and that same
John,
Who splendours saw of the new Jerusalem,
The rainbow throne, the sardius, emerald,—
Here, also, saw what fed his artist-eye;—
Saw much grass in the place; the vivid-hued
Garments of eastern men amongst the flowers,—
Kaleidoscope of colours: soon, the word
Came, bidding all to sit by companies;
See, a score of open squares, with space in midst
Where Christ stood with th’ disciples, and that
meal—
The little meal which should sustain them all—
Mocking the eyes of thousand hungry folk
Thus bidden to break fast! Did any know
With soft assurance in his inward heart
That, the thing He gives sufficeth, less or more?
How good to us, anhungered, to perceive
The Master’s mind disclosed in all the tale,
See order emanating from His act
As song from throat of throstle! so did John see
A jewelled glory as of painted glass
Reflected on his vision from Christ’s thought! —
How good to see our Saviour in the midst
Dealing out bread to all that multitude
E’en as He deals to us in harvest field!
The harvest’s yellow glory in all lands,
In Egypt, Syria, distant western fields,
The table spread for us as for the birds,—
How this one scene interprets the Lord’s ways!
Lo, that large circle, those five thousand souls,
Raised eyes to Him in their midst; He took the
loaves,—
The little barley cakes, the fishes two,—
And, looking up to heaven, He blessed the meat
And gave God thanks Who feeds us. That poor
“Grace”
We say before meat,—convicted, we elude
The eye of Him who taught us! Consider we
This feeding of five thousand, and we perceive
How the very life of God comes with our bread!
He brake the loaves and fishes, gave the meat
To the disciples, they to th’ multitude:—
Behold, our uses! That He hands to us,
For distribution is’t, that all may eat;
We, honoured in His service and in theirs.
The people ate accustomed fare with zest—
The wonder of ’t! And ate the more to try,
Could the supply give out and any lack ?
In time they were all filled; and the ordered
mind
Of Him, the universe sustains and made,
Appeared in a little matter: “Gather up,”
Said He who fed them with unlaboured act,
“The broken pieces left that none be lost.”
No trifling thing, these fragments of men’s
food: —
Organic life alone can life sustain;
Cycles of time, processes manifold,
Initial act creative, evolving care
Of Him who first had made,—all these had gone To make rejected crust, fragment of fish:
And those twelve baskets filled with broken
meat,
Of God’s world-providence tell all the tale!
A PDF is available here.
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "III A venture of faith" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
III A venture of faith
THE Lord sat wearied after day-long speech,
Passing of “virtue” from Him in those signs—
Compassionate miracles—He wrought for them.
The people looked and heard and took their fill
Of the life that was in Jesus. (Wherefore, then,
But a handful gathered in that upper room
To fulfil their last obedience, when multitudes,
Arrested by His signs, had paid that due—
Attention to His words—which should lead to life?
Alack, an active part was theirs to play:
’Tis not enough to feed—e’en on the Word:
To assimilate that we take is our concern,
Else, go we empty!)
Lifting up His eyes,—
He sees great multitudes have come to Him:
Ah, good for us that one was by who loved,
And garnered bread for Christendom’s fond heart!
Blessèd to know that, there He sat, our LORD;
Where lies the spot, we know not, but rejoice
With brooding mind to know that, on a place,
Here on our very earth, the Saviour sat!
Bless’d, to know surely that He raised His
eyes;—
Love treasures such things up; the love of John
Made record for us; our love tells her gains;
Surpassing reverence transports the heart
To note the Lord’s regard, observe Him, sit!
And now the Master tests that growth in faith—
The disciples’ sole concern, our only care:
One picks He out; turning to Philip, saith,
(Our testing finds us ever one by one!)
“Whence buy we bread that all these folk may
eat?”
As when a King calls young knight to his side—
“Thou art a man of valour—knightly hest
I lay on thee; go, do this valiant deed!”—
Was Philip honoured that day ’mongst his peers
With opportunity for splendid faith,
More in regard of Christ than any work!
Would we’d been there to answer, “Lord, I
know
That thou canst feed men, heal them, give them
life!”—
Such chance was Philip’s: but perceived he not
Himself, a school-boy called to say his task;
The lesson, is it conned? Go higher, thou;
But, stumblest in the saying? Go thou down:
So, Philip had his chance to praise the Lord!
By what perverseness harden we our heart
When friend makes meek appeal for sympathy
In noble purpose, soul-uplifting thought?
Then, practical, are we; would count the cost,
Bid him beware of that generosity,
Or sneering men will ask, ‘What hast in bank,
What coin or credit with the Highest?’ So,
Did Philip answer, reckoning up the cost:
“Two hundred pennyworth is not enough
To afford a little bread to each of these.”—
Alas, for Philip! One chance, they say, men
have,
One single chance of greatness in a life:
Philip lost his for common sordid thought—
What good’s done on the earth, that, money does;
And, Were we rich, what great things would we
do!
Another heard, one of a generous stock,
Whose brother cast his all on one great throw,
One lottery of faith,—Peter, who owned,
“Thou art the Christ of God!”—Now, Andrew
saith,
“A lad’s here with five loaves, two fishes small;”—
And in his heart he thought, “Enough for one,
May’t in His hands feed all this numerous host?”
Sudden ashamed of his temerity,
Fall’n cowardly, he adds—“but what are they
For all this multitude?” With failing heart,
He launched his petty bark, the “Little Faith”:
Ah, were’t an ocean vessel for this voyage!
A PDF is available here.
THE Lord sat wearied after day-long speech,
Passing of “virtue” from Him in those signs—
Compassionate miracles—He wrought for them.
The people looked and heard and took their fill
Of the life that was in Jesus. (Wherefore, then,
But a handful gathered in that upper room
To fulfil their last obedience, when multitudes,
Arrested by His signs, had paid that due—
Attention to His words—which should lead to life?
Alack, an active part was theirs to play:
’Tis not enough to feed—e’en on the Word:
To assimilate that we take is our concern,
Else, go we empty!)
Lifting up His eyes,—
He sees great multitudes have come to Him:
Ah, good for us that one was by who loved,
And garnered bread for Christendom’s fond heart!
Blessèd to know that, there He sat, our LORD;
Where lies the spot, we know not, but rejoice
With brooding mind to know that, on a place,
Here on our very earth, the Saviour sat!
Bless’d, to know surely that He raised His
eyes;—
Love treasures such things up; the love of John
Made record for us; our love tells her gains;
Surpassing reverence transports the heart
To note the Lord’s regard, observe Him, sit!
And now the Master tests that growth in faith—
The disciples’ sole concern, our only care:
One picks He out; turning to Philip, saith,
(Our testing finds us ever one by one!)
“Whence buy we bread that all these folk may
eat?”
As when a King calls young knight to his side—
“Thou art a man of valour—knightly hest
I lay on thee; go, do this valiant deed!”—
Was Philip honoured that day ’mongst his peers
With opportunity for splendid faith,
More in regard of Christ than any work!
Would we’d been there to answer, “Lord, I
know
That thou canst feed men, heal them, give them
life!”—
Such chance was Philip’s: but perceived he not
Himself, a school-boy called to say his task;
The lesson, is it conned? Go higher, thou;
But, stumblest in the saying? Go thou down:
So, Philip had his chance to praise the Lord!
By what perverseness harden we our heart
When friend makes meek appeal for sympathy
In noble purpose, soul-uplifting thought?
Then, practical, are we; would count the cost,
Bid him beware of that generosity,
Or sneering men will ask, ‘What hast in bank,
What coin or credit with the Highest?’ So,
Did Philip answer, reckoning up the cost:
“Two hundred pennyworth is not enough
To afford a little bread to each of these.”—
Alas, for Philip! One chance, they say, men
have,
One single chance of greatness in a life:
Philip lost his for common sordid thought—
What good’s done on the earth, that, money does;
And, Were we rich, what great things would we
do!
Another heard, one of a generous stock,
Whose brother cast his all on one great throw,
One lottery of faith,—Peter, who owned,
“Thou art the Christ of God!”—Now, Andrew
saith,
“A lad’s here with five loaves, two fishes small;”—
And in his heart he thought, “Enough for one,
May’t in His hands feed all this numerous host?”
Sudden ashamed of his temerity,
Fall’n cowardly, he adds—“but what are they
For all this multitude?” With failing heart,
He launched his petty bark, the “Little Faith”:
Ah, were’t an ocean vessel for this voyage!
A PDF is available here.
Monday, October 16, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "II Jesus went up into the mountain" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
II “Jesus went up into the mountain”
HE climbed the slope in sight of all the folk;
They watched, nor looked away, and knew at
heart,
Unknowing that they knew, that in Him alone
Was all their hope, their life; without Him,
nought!
He sat with His disciples there; He spake
Of the Kingdom of God and how men enter in:
Of what, we know not save by gathering up
Words elsewhere He had uttered, other time;
By conceiving baffling thought of parables
And sayings precious, unregarded pearls,
That no man gathered for our after-use!
The time wore on; for many hours the folk,
A moved and swaying throng, gave heed to words
That Christ let fall among them. The day far
spent,
The Disciples came to Him, urged common
sense;
(Nay, sure, in this thing, they more wise than
He!
So the crowd scores o’er poets and the rest,
Who top them by head and shoulders; they
have sense!)
Sententious spake they, in dull human wise;
“See, here’s a desert place, night’s drawing on,
A great multitude’s about with nought to eat,—
Forgetting hunger now, but, by-and-by?—
Good Master, be advised; send them away
That they may lodge in villages at hand
And buy somewhat to eat!” “What need that
they
Should go away? give ye them bread to eat.”
Were ever men of sense brought quicker up
Before th’impossible, preposterous!
All high things knew the Lord, but this small
thing—
The people’s supper, how to get them home,—
How should great minds descend to small con-
cerns?
Their plan was good, but He must have His way,
And theirs, to abide the thing He willed to do!
A PDF is available here.
HE climbed the slope in sight of all the folk;
They watched, nor looked away, and knew at
heart,
Unknowing that they knew, that in Him alone
Was all their hope, their life; without Him,
nought!
He sat with His disciples there; He spake
Of the Kingdom of God and how men enter in:
Of what, we know not save by gathering up
Words elsewhere He had uttered, other time;
By conceiving baffling thought of parables
And sayings precious, unregarded pearls,
That no man gathered for our after-use!
The time wore on; for many hours the folk,
A moved and swaying throng, gave heed to words
That Christ let fall among them. The day far
spent,
The Disciples came to Him, urged common
sense;
(Nay, sure, in this thing, they more wise than
He!
So the crowd scores o’er poets and the rest,
Who top them by head and shoulders; they
have sense!)
Sententious spake they, in dull human wise;
“See, here’s a desert place, night’s drawing on,
A great multitude’s about with nought to eat,—
Forgetting hunger now, but, by-and-by?—
Good Master, be advised; send them away
That they may lodge in villages at hand
And buy somewhat to eat!” “What need that
they
Should go away? give ye them bread to eat.”
Were ever men of sense brought quicker up
Before th’impossible, preposterous!
All high things knew the Lord, but this small
thing—
The people’s supper, how to get them home,—
How should great minds descend to small con-
cerns?
Their plan was good, but He must have His way,
And theirs, to abide the thing He willed to do!
A PDF is available here.
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Charlotte Mason: "I In a desert place" (from Saviour of the World, Vol. IV)
I In a desert place
“COME ye apart to a desert place and rest,”
Saith Christ to His Chosen Twelve, returned to
Him
From wanderings, healings, teachings, manifold.
But, see, the people will not be outdone,
Nor let their Lord, theirs also, out of sight!
They watched Him enter the boat with those, His
friends;
Tumultuous, eager, followed they on foot
Round the head of the lake, heedless of noon-day
heat;
Crowds gathered to them from the cities round,
And, lo, that desert place the Lord had sought—
Spot lovely and remembered, was’t, perhaps,
For many a prayerful vigil, solitary,—
The crowd, iconoclast, had broke the spell,
Shattered that image of sweet solitude
Which refreshed the Master’s thought! See,
multitudes
Are there before Him, waiting for His words.
Men of sweet nature, sure, might feel annoy
At such rude trespass on hour set apart
For rest and converse with their chosen friends:
They of sweet nature, aye, but not the Christ:
Tender, He welcomed all those scattered sheep
Having no shepherd; diligently taught
Through the long day things that concerned
their peace—
Things of the Kingdom which was for each of
them:
They heard with greedy ear: all learned that
day,
That, whoso comes to Christ comes always well;
Never intrudes on secret communings,
Hears words for other ears, presumes on hours
Devoted to great matters; all’s for him,
Poor wretch who has no claim!
A PDF is available here
“COME ye apart to a desert place and rest,”
Saith Christ to His Chosen Twelve, returned to
Him
From wanderings, healings, teachings, manifold.
But, see, the people will not be outdone,
Nor let their Lord, theirs also, out of sight!
They watched Him enter the boat with those, His
friends;
Tumultuous, eager, followed they on foot
Round the head of the lake, heedless of noon-day
heat;
Crowds gathered to them from the cities round,
And, lo, that desert place the Lord had sought—
Spot lovely and remembered, was’t, perhaps,
For many a prayerful vigil, solitary,—
The crowd, iconoclast, had broke the spell,
Shattered that image of sweet solitude
Which refreshed the Master’s thought! See,
multitudes
Are there before Him, waiting for His words.
Men of sweet nature, sure, might feel annoy
At such rude trespass on hour set apart
For rest and converse with their chosen friends:
They of sweet nature, aye, but not the Christ:
Tender, He welcomed all those scattered sheep
Having no shepherd; diligently taught
Through the long day things that concerned
their peace—
Things of the Kingdom which was for each of
them:
They heard with greedy ear: all learned that
day,
That, whoso comes to Christ comes always well;
Never intrudes on secret communings,
Hears words for other ears, presumes on hours
Devoted to great matters; all’s for him,
Poor wretch who has no claim!
A PDF is available here
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Of Desperation and Desire in The Killers’ Battle Born
This paper was presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music - Canadian Branch Annual Conference in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2013. Some of the material here went on to a book review on Virilio that was published by Philosophy in Review. Some Virilio material also found its way into my book on Bowie, released by McFarland in 2015.
This paper will explore transience, desire, desperation and labour in the songs of The Killer’s Battle Born. It will take into account theoretical notions of desire and transience, in order to demonstrate how the album encapsulates these notions, creating a vivid picture, a desperate moment in time.
The celebrated Las Vegas band, The Killers, released their fourth studio album in 2012, called Battle Born. The band has also released 3 music videos in association with the album. Not all of the reviews seem to exactly legitimize the band’s output; while the reviewers of the song and video are mostly positive in their assessment, they are not always entirely serious. Jason Lipshutz, writing for Billboard, encourages the fans to “Let your fists punch the cold night air, rock fans—this one’s for you.” Writing for Rolling Stone, Jon Dolan describes Brandon Flowers’ singing with the following: “singer Brandon Flowers’ unmistakable commitment to unmistakable commitment. . . . Kind of cool, kind of ridiculous, and Vegas all the way.”
“Runaways,” though, recounts the experience of requited teenage love which blossoms to engagement because of pregnancy. Unfortunately, the male narrator of the song seems to have some trouble with the arrangement: “but I got the tendency to slip when the nights get wild.” Now married, the protagonist seems unsettled, pining for their happy past together. Nevertheless, the protagonist ends the song with the resolution that he will not let her go, since, after all, we are just “runaways.” What is particularly interesting for this present study is the nature of the lyrics: Flowers creates descriptive verses that seem to carry the song along a loose narrative. He writes of “blonde hair blowin’ in the summer wind / a blue-eyed girl playing in the sand,” and of their time later, “at night I come home after they [that is, the protagonist’s wife and child] go to sleep / like a stumbling ghost, I haunt these halls / There’s a picture of us on our wedding day.” These are vivid images that both involve and evoke photographs. Can the various vivid images that are captured in the lyrics of “Runaways” be likened to photographs, mediated “slices” of a sort of reality, arresting an image and enticing the viewer to discover the greater narrative?
If so, do they contain what Roland Barthes calls an “air,” the notion of the soul, the shadow, that makes an image “true”? Then this is the locus of the listener’s desire, what keeps the listener listening, and what makes, for that listener, the songs “true.” In his novelistic study of photography as a cultural process published in 1980, Camera Lucida, Barthes writes about the desire that he confronts when dealing with certain photographs. He wishes to “enter the paper’s depth,” a desire to see something more than simply the image that is presented. (100) He refers to notions of desire here: “I can have the fond hope of discovering truth,” though he admits he will not find it. (99)
He suggests that, sometimes, he perceives something of the truth in a photograph, what he calls “a likeness,” but the likeness is imprecise or imaginary. He concludes, “I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph.” The photograph is unlike the text; that is, “our vision of it is certain,” a curious thing for a semiologist to suggest. The photograph arrests interpretation: “this-has-been.” (106-107)
Barthes’ frustration is evident here: he still seeks (more properly, desires) something more in the photograph. He wishes to discover the person in the photograph completely. It seems here that Barthes is grasping at straws, so to speak. He wants to find the truth in a photograph, and so he finds, as the locus of his desires, the air (or the expression). But then he immediately writes, “The air of a face is unanalyzable.” (107) But it evokes for the observer, “little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another.” (109) The air is what allows Barthes to identify his mother in the Winter Garden photograph.
For Barthes, this is the culmination of his desperate search through photographs, something that began as a phenomenological study of why photographs, these “slices of reality,” papers imbued with such memory and power, were so effective, and what draws people to view and keep them. Partly, the study emerges from the mourning that Barthes was experiencing due to the death of his mother in 1978.
Brian Dillon puts it this way:
If one can think of the narrative and descriptive moments in the songs as photographs, can one think of the songs as fleeting and transient as well? Paul Virilio speaks of a kind of desperation in the transience of modern global society.
Is such transience also depicted in the spacial aspects of the music, such as on the track “Battle Born”? Writers at Billboard describe the song this way: “Rather than descend back towards earth on the album’s final song, the Killers come out guns blazing on ‘Battle Born’s’ finale.” The song begins with a single guitar playing over some soft strings until the full band joins it, until succumbing to a more sparse accompaniment once Flowers begins singing the first verse. With the chorus, the guitars rise in volume and the listener hears the first instance of strong background vocals (evoking Queen’s choir-like backing vocals). These vocals contribute to an increasing intensity as the song develops to a sort of climax, during which Flowers and the backing vocals alternate their delivery, in a sort of two-pronged attack that not only builds intensity, but also contributes to a sense of greater aural space. This might be why the writers at billboard use the following phrases to describe the album’s sounds: Battle Born contains songs that come close to “stadium size”; “stadium ready”; “aspiring anthem,” that is, songs that are aspiring to be anthemic; and songs “rooted in 80s arena riffage.” What is particularly compelling here is not only the description of aural space that the writers describe, but also the memory or nostalgia that is evoked in these sorts of phrases. The Killers and its lead singer Flowers cannot stand on their—or his—own, but must instead be situated among other artists, be it Queen, Bruce Springsteen or U2. Just as photographs point directly to their referents, so The Killers point to those bands that precede them. In a way, like photography, The Killers keep their referents alive. Of photography, Walter Benjamin writes,
One must also consider Brandon Flowers’ singing voice in this discussion: Flowers employs a very quick vibrato, which evokes the feeling that he is pushing his voice. His intonation is often slightly sharp, a consequence often blamed on tension in the singing voice. Both tension and the notion of pushing the voice both connote desparation, or the manic working out of some issue.
Desperation is often manifest in a kind of labour, in getting “worked up.” Both Barthes and Paul Virilio hint at this, in that desire demands a certain amount of work, in expressing, of searching and consuming, of effort in moving from one place to another to escape congestion, to long for another place or the next place.
Consider the depiction of airfields and road vehicles in “The Way it Was,” and the transience and soft relationships of new communications technologies in “Here with Me” (with images on cell phones rather than personal intimacy)?
Paul Virilio, in his book The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject, approaches the subject of future environmental migrants, those displaced by conflict as well as by development projects. If earlier eras were about ‘sustainable staying-put,’ this new era will be one of ‘habitable circulation,’ which calls into question notions of citizenship and nationhood. He calls the resulting upheavals the ‘portable revolution,’ which, along with revolutions in transportation and transmission technologies, will lead to what he calls an ‘interactive planisphere.’ Throughout the work, Virilio moves from the smaller scale (for instance, discussing the loading dock or the train station) to the larger scale (the city as a whole, or the whole world in movement), suggesting that these spaces of movement are ultimately ungovernable, at least in terms of conventional legal governance.
Throughout the book, Virilio explores the idea of speed in the early twenty-first century and its results. His text is formatted for speed: he mentions issues and leaves them, moving on to a new issue with a new paragraph; this is not unlike the fragmentary nature of song lyrics. His book is an uncompromising look at the power of what he calls révolution de l’emport, or what translator Julie Rose has deemed the ‘portable revolution,’ a movement enacted because of the increases in the ‘payload capacity,’ or capacité d’emport, of the twenty-first century, in terms of transportation and communications technologies. If space is problematized in the twenty-first century, due to progress in terms of communication and transportation technologies, so is time, as Virilio argues in the third section of the book, ‘The Futurism of the Instant.’ What he calls ‘the balance of computerized terror’ leads to a loss of memory—a loss of the past, but also a loss of the future. Virilio argues, rather, that the result is the experience of a kind of perpetual instant.
What Virilio sees as a blight he also sees as a solution: in order to solve problems such as the erasure of space and time, and the chronic consumption of the Earth by its occupants, he suggests that we become nomads, to counteract the sedentary characteristics of the Ultracity. In its constant communication and transportation flows, one can find, in a way, rootedness. This is a rootedness in the notion of global citizenship, a community of all peoples, for the sake of the planet. If Virilio’s work seems too negative, he at least offers some glimmer of hope in a method of reversal of what, in other parts of his book, seem to be inevitable results of technological and spacial globalization.
The Killers are fundamentally, then, a band without roots: drawing musically from the 1980s, informed by the 2000s, inspired by English and Irish bands, and situated in the western United States. Their “unrootedness,” their supeficiality as recognized by reviewers, is manifest in their desperation, as they exist as a sort of photograph of the “perpetual instant.”
Sources:
Author Unknown. “The Killers, ‘Battle Born’: Track-By-Track Review.” billboard.com (17 September 2012). Available from http://www.billboard.com/articles/review/1066848/the-killers-battle-born-track-by-track-review. Internet. Accessed 30 April 2013.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” Selected Writings, Volume 2 (1927-1934). Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999.
Dillon, Brian. “Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes.” The Guardian (26 March 2011). Available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.
Dolan, Jon. “Reviews: The Killers—‘Runaways.’” Rolling Stone (13 July 2012). Available from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/songreviews/runaways-20120713. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.
Edwards, Steve. Photography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lipshutz, Jason. “Watch The Killers Be Epic in Their ‘Runaways’ Music Video.” billboard.com (26 July 2012). Available from http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/480765/watch-the-killers-be-epic-in-their-runaways-music-video. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.
Virilio, Paul. The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.
This paper will explore transience, desire, desperation and labour in the songs of The Killer’s Battle Born. It will take into account theoretical notions of desire and transience, in order to demonstrate how the album encapsulates these notions, creating a vivid picture, a desperate moment in time.
The celebrated Las Vegas band, The Killers, released their fourth studio album in 2012, called Battle Born. The band has also released 3 music videos in association with the album. Not all of the reviews seem to exactly legitimize the band’s output; while the reviewers of the song and video are mostly positive in their assessment, they are not always entirely serious. Jason Lipshutz, writing for Billboard, encourages the fans to “Let your fists punch the cold night air, rock fans—this one’s for you.” Writing for Rolling Stone, Jon Dolan describes Brandon Flowers’ singing with the following: “singer Brandon Flowers’ unmistakable commitment to unmistakable commitment. . . . Kind of cool, kind of ridiculous, and Vegas all the way.”
“Runaways,” though, recounts the experience of requited teenage love which blossoms to engagement because of pregnancy. Unfortunately, the male narrator of the song seems to have some trouble with the arrangement: “but I got the tendency to slip when the nights get wild.” Now married, the protagonist seems unsettled, pining for their happy past together. Nevertheless, the protagonist ends the song with the resolution that he will not let her go, since, after all, we are just “runaways.” What is particularly interesting for this present study is the nature of the lyrics: Flowers creates descriptive verses that seem to carry the song along a loose narrative. He writes of “blonde hair blowin’ in the summer wind / a blue-eyed girl playing in the sand,” and of their time later, “at night I come home after they [that is, the protagonist’s wife and child] go to sleep / like a stumbling ghost, I haunt these halls / There’s a picture of us on our wedding day.” These are vivid images that both involve and evoke photographs. Can the various vivid images that are captured in the lyrics of “Runaways” be likened to photographs, mediated “slices” of a sort of reality, arresting an image and enticing the viewer to discover the greater narrative?
If so, do they contain what Roland Barthes calls an “air,” the notion of the soul, the shadow, that makes an image “true”? Then this is the locus of the listener’s desire, what keeps the listener listening, and what makes, for that listener, the songs “true.” In his novelistic study of photography as a cultural process published in 1980, Camera Lucida, Barthes writes about the desire that he confronts when dealing with certain photographs. He wishes to “enter the paper’s depth,” a desire to see something more than simply the image that is presented. (100) He refers to notions of desire here: “I can have the fond hope of discovering truth,” though he admits he will not find it. (99)
He suggests that, sometimes, he perceives something of the truth in a photograph, what he calls “a likeness,” but the likeness is imprecise or imaginary. He concludes, “I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph.” The photograph is unlike the text; that is, “our vision of it is certain,” a curious thing for a semiologist to suggest. The photograph arrests interpretation: “this-has-been.” (106-107)
Barthes’ frustration is evident here: he still seeks (more properly, desires) something more in the photograph. He wishes to discover the person in the photograph completely. It seems here that Barthes is grasping at straws, so to speak. He wants to find the truth in a photograph, and so he finds, as the locus of his desires, the air (or the expression). But then he immediately writes, “The air of a face is unanalyzable.” (107) But it evokes for the observer, “little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another.” (109) The air is what allows Barthes to identify his mother in the Winter Garden photograph.
For Barthes, this is the culmination of his desperate search through photographs, something that began as a phenomenological study of why photographs, these “slices of reality,” papers imbued with such memory and power, were so effective, and what draws people to view and keep them. Partly, the study emerges from the mourning that Barthes was experiencing due to the death of his mother in 1978.
Brian Dillon puts it this way:
Having lost his mother, with whom he had lived most of his life, he goes looking for her among old photographs; time and again the face he finds is not quite hers, even if objectively she looks like herself. At last, he discovers her true likeness, the “air” that he remembers, in a picture of Henriette aged five, taken in a winter garden in 1898. (In the journal entry that recounts this discovery, Barthes simply notes: “Je pleure.”)Barthes explains it as follows:
All the photographs of my mother which I was looking through were a little like so many masks; at the last, suddenly the mask vanished: there remained a soul, ageless but not timeless, since this air was the person I used to see, consubstantial with her face, each day of her long life. (110)This is what makes a true photograph: the capturing of the air (one’s soul, one’s shadow). But then consider Flowers’ words to the song “Here with Me,” in which he sings, “Don’t want your picture / on my cell phone / I want you here with me.” In this instance, the cell phone as carrier of images, does not allow the transmission of the “air” of the subject of the photograph. The narrator desires to have the person with them, physically present, rather than present in the photograph.
If one can think of the narrative and descriptive moments in the songs as photographs, can one think of the songs as fleeting and transient as well? Paul Virilio speaks of a kind of desperation in the transience of modern global society.
Is such transience also depicted in the spacial aspects of the music, such as on the track “Battle Born”? Writers at Billboard describe the song this way: “Rather than descend back towards earth on the album’s final song, the Killers come out guns blazing on ‘Battle Born’s’ finale.” The song begins with a single guitar playing over some soft strings until the full band joins it, until succumbing to a more sparse accompaniment once Flowers begins singing the first verse. With the chorus, the guitars rise in volume and the listener hears the first instance of strong background vocals (evoking Queen’s choir-like backing vocals). These vocals contribute to an increasing intensity as the song develops to a sort of climax, during which Flowers and the backing vocals alternate their delivery, in a sort of two-pronged attack that not only builds intensity, but also contributes to a sense of greater aural space. This might be why the writers at billboard use the following phrases to describe the album’s sounds: Battle Born contains songs that come close to “stadium size”; “stadium ready”; “aspiring anthem,” that is, songs that are aspiring to be anthemic; and songs “rooted in 80s arena riffage.” What is particularly compelling here is not only the description of aural space that the writers describe, but also the memory or nostalgia that is evoked in these sorts of phrases. The Killers and its lead singer Flowers cannot stand on their—or his—own, but must instead be situated among other artists, be it Queen, Bruce Springsteen or U2. Just as photographs point directly to their referents, so The Killers point to those bands that precede them. In a way, like photography, The Killers keep their referents alive. Of photography, Walter Benjamin writes,
No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. (510)As Steve Edwards explains, in his brief history of photography, “Memory is, after all, a trace or impression of the past that takes place in the present.” (120)
One must also consider Brandon Flowers’ singing voice in this discussion: Flowers employs a very quick vibrato, which evokes the feeling that he is pushing his voice. His intonation is often slightly sharp, a consequence often blamed on tension in the singing voice. Both tension and the notion of pushing the voice both connote desparation, or the manic working out of some issue.
Desperation is often manifest in a kind of labour, in getting “worked up.” Both Barthes and Paul Virilio hint at this, in that desire demands a certain amount of work, in expressing, of searching and consuming, of effort in moving from one place to another to escape congestion, to long for another place or the next place.
Consider the depiction of airfields and road vehicles in “The Way it Was,” and the transience and soft relationships of new communications technologies in “Here with Me” (with images on cell phones rather than personal intimacy)?
Paul Virilio, in his book The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject, approaches the subject of future environmental migrants, those displaced by conflict as well as by development projects. If earlier eras were about ‘sustainable staying-put,’ this new era will be one of ‘habitable circulation,’ which calls into question notions of citizenship and nationhood. He calls the resulting upheavals the ‘portable revolution,’ which, along with revolutions in transportation and transmission technologies, will lead to what he calls an ‘interactive planisphere.’ Throughout the work, Virilio moves from the smaller scale (for instance, discussing the loading dock or the train station) to the larger scale (the city as a whole, or the whole world in movement), suggesting that these spaces of movement are ultimately ungovernable, at least in terms of conventional legal governance.
Throughout the book, Virilio explores the idea of speed in the early twenty-first century and its results. His text is formatted for speed: he mentions issues and leaves them, moving on to a new issue with a new paragraph; this is not unlike the fragmentary nature of song lyrics. His book is an uncompromising look at the power of what he calls révolution de l’emport, or what translator Julie Rose has deemed the ‘portable revolution,’ a movement enacted because of the increases in the ‘payload capacity,’ or capacité d’emport, of the twenty-first century, in terms of transportation and communications technologies. If space is problematized in the twenty-first century, due to progress in terms of communication and transportation technologies, so is time, as Virilio argues in the third section of the book, ‘The Futurism of the Instant.’ What he calls ‘the balance of computerized terror’ leads to a loss of memory—a loss of the past, but also a loss of the future. Virilio argues, rather, that the result is the experience of a kind of perpetual instant.
What Virilio sees as a blight he also sees as a solution: in order to solve problems such as the erasure of space and time, and the chronic consumption of the Earth by its occupants, he suggests that we become nomads, to counteract the sedentary characteristics of the Ultracity. In its constant communication and transportation flows, one can find, in a way, rootedness. This is a rootedness in the notion of global citizenship, a community of all peoples, for the sake of the planet. If Virilio’s work seems too negative, he at least offers some glimmer of hope in a method of reversal of what, in other parts of his book, seem to be inevitable results of technological and spacial globalization.
The Killers are fundamentally, then, a band without roots: drawing musically from the 1980s, informed by the 2000s, inspired by English and Irish bands, and situated in the western United States. Their “unrootedness,” their supeficiality as recognized by reviewers, is manifest in their desperation, as they exist as a sort of photograph of the “perpetual instant.”
Sources:
Author Unknown. “The Killers, ‘Battle Born’: Track-By-Track Review.” billboard.com (17 September 2012). Available from http://www.billboard.com/articles/review/1066848/the-killers-battle-born-track-by-track-review. Internet. Accessed 30 April 2013.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” Selected Writings, Volume 2 (1927-1934). Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999.
Dillon, Brian. “Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes.” The Guardian (26 March 2011). Available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.
Dolan, Jon. “Reviews: The Killers—‘Runaways.’” Rolling Stone (13 July 2012). Available from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/songreviews/runaways-20120713. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.
Edwards, Steve. Photography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lipshutz, Jason. “Watch The Killers Be Epic in Their ‘Runaways’ Music Video.” billboard.com (26 July 2012). Available from http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/480765/watch-the-killers-be-epic-in-their-runaways-music-video. Internet. Accessed 29 April 2013.
Virilio, Paul. The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.
Wednesday, June 07, 2017
Father Elijah
Father Elijah was the first Michael O'Brien book that I ever read, on the recommendation of a friend. As a young Evangelical Protestant, the story of a priest, along with (what I thought was) Vatican intrigue and Stato (the Vatican Secretary of State) and Dottrina (the Vatican Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) was a sort of exotic Other for me. I thought the story was a great read and a glimpse into a world that I found both mysterious and a bit forbidden (being a Protestant, after all). Rereading the book many years later, I didn't find it as effective as I did when I was younger: there are moments in the narrative during which the pages turn quickly (if you will), but there are others where O'Brien seems to step on his own soap-box, decrying societal lack or spiritual insensitivity. This is not to say that there isn't a very sincere and proper heart to the book. I think it does something quite daring, if not a bit theatrical. It tries to be a Roman Catholic take on apocalyptic--Dispensational-flavoured-- literature. In 2016, O'Brien published a follow-up to Father Elijah called Elijah in Jerusalem, a new book which spurred me on to read the older works. Part of the experience was nostalgic: I'm in a very different place personally than I was upon first reading. I must thank O'Brien, though, for this earlier book, a sort of guide for where I would be today, and a sincere and proper heart at the centre of his work.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
The Handmaid's Tale
In preparation of watching Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, I decided to read Margaret Atwood's original novel of the same name. This was the first time I had ever read the novel; I was not fortunate enough to read it in high school or during my university days. One of the saving graces for this novel--that actually allowed me to finish reading the novel--were its short chapters. I am notorious for not finishing a book, but I finished this one. I attribute my success not only to Atwood's short chapters, but also my fondness for dystopian fiction. The world that Atwood creates is rich, though terrifying. I think, though, that, at the end, the book is slightly less satisfying than I was expecting. Atwood creates a rich world, but leaves a lot to the imagination, in terms of the continued details of the world. I understand that world creation is not necessarily the final point of the book (rather, the control of the body and the tyranny of both unbridled feminism and misogyny), but the ending left me thinking that the narrative might need a bit more. Perhaps the details of the world will come through the visuals of the series. The trailers suggest as such, so I'm looking forward to it.
Sunday, March 05, 2017
The Bad Beginning
I am embarking on a reading binge (more accurately, I have already begun a reading binge) and thought that I would write a very short review of the books as I complete them. The first book that I have finished is The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I have been watching the Netflix series of the same title and thought I'd begin to read the series again. The first time through, I only read up to the middle of Book 5; there are 13 books in the series, so I still have a long way to go. I believe this was the third time I have read The Bad Beginning.
I have a love-hate relationship with these books, I think. This relationship extends to the Jim Carrey movie and these Netflix episodes as well. I like the idea of the books: the world that Snicket (AKA Handler) creates is whimsical, but not in a Diagon Alley way. To explain, I was immediately perturbed by the first Harry Potter book because of the reference to Diagon Alley, which seemed a silly name for a place, a place that is supposed to exist in the real world (not in some alternate dimension). There is little reference in The Bad Beginning to the real world (though the Netflix series talks about Winnipeg).
What I found pleasurable in reading this book this time, though, was the feel of the physical book in my hands: the print was big, the chapters short. The story was simple and humourous. It was a bit of a break from Proust, which I am trying to slog through in this reading binge. My plans are not to read the second book right away (I'll try to get through one of my other books first). My reading binge began with too many books at once (12, I think).
So, look forward to these write-ups after each book is completed. I'll refrain from doing a sort of Barthesian reading of this book at this point. Don't think it will never happen, though.
I have a love-hate relationship with these books, I think. This relationship extends to the Jim Carrey movie and these Netflix episodes as well. I like the idea of the books: the world that Snicket (AKA Handler) creates is whimsical, but not in a Diagon Alley way. To explain, I was immediately perturbed by the first Harry Potter book because of the reference to Diagon Alley, which seemed a silly name for a place, a place that is supposed to exist in the real world (not in some alternate dimension). There is little reference in The Bad Beginning to the real world (though the Netflix series talks about Winnipeg).
What I found pleasurable in reading this book this time, though, was the feel of the physical book in my hands: the print was big, the chapters short. The story was simple and humourous. It was a bit of a break from Proust, which I am trying to slog through in this reading binge. My plans are not to read the second book right away (I'll try to get through one of my other books first). My reading binge began with too many books at once (12, I think).
So, look forward to these write-ups after each book is completed. I'll refrain from doing a sort of Barthesian reading of this book at this point. Don't think it will never happen, though.
Saturday, February 20, 2016
“A Swaying and Fluttering Form”: Foucault’s Heterotopias in Eco’s The Name of the Rose
In honour of Umberto Eco upon his death, here is a paper I originally presented at the CISPCR Symposium in 2013. Some of the material was modified and applied to Bowie, and appears in my book on Bowie, published by McFarland and Company in 2015.
Michel Foucault writes of certain spaces that “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” (Foucault 24) He calls such spaces heterotopias. For Adso, the narrator-protagonist in Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel, The Name of the Rose, the biblical text of the Song of Songs acts as a sort of heterotopia, a mirror which reflects (and distorts) his position; “it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position.” To clarify, there are moments in the novel where Adso’s heterosexuality, a subject position assumed by his piety, by his position in monastic life in the early part of the second millennium, is suspect: “even today my old age is stirred ... when my eyes ... happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden’s.” (Eco 159) At another moment, Adso reflects on an incident of heterosexual impropriety, and uses the text of the Song of Songs in order to deflect, perhaps, suggestions of sexual impropriety in the text. None of this is sure, though; in fact, the novel as a whole seems to enact a sort of heterotopic space. It is what could, what might, but what is not (necessarily).
An article, “Of Other Spaces,” was published in 1986, a translation of Michel Foucault’s lecture, “Des Espaces Autres,” given in March 1967. In the english translation by Jay Miskowiec, Foucault describes a sort of history of space. Of note, he suggests that the “actual” space of the Middle Ages constitutes what he calls a “space of emplacement”: “a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men).” (22) This is an important observation considering the setting for Eco’s novel, that of a monastery in the fourteenth-century. For Foucault, the Middle Ages demonstrated “this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places” in a particularly marked and compelling way. The Middle Ages was an age in which one was strongly placed in a certain space, without possibility for mobility. Each space, also, was marked as what it was, without the possibility of change; categorization of space, and of its occupants, was fixed. As in other areas of Foucault’s study, the study of space reveals power relations.
To only slightly oversimplify, Foucault suggests that the spaces that one lives in that define one’s life are also defined by society, and other power holders and discourse creators and reinforcers. The spaces or sites in which one lives are related to each other: these spaces are through which order is established in society. Foucault states, though, that such mundane sites are not of ultimate interest to him:
Foucault discusses various principles of heterotopia; one of his principles suggests that “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” (26) Haft, White and White, in their massive work, The Key to the Name of the Rose, suggest that the Middle Ages, that space that Foucault calls a “space of emplacement,” is “an historical ‘open work.’” (Haft, White and White 23) That period has no definitive opening or closing, which works to make the novel itself both “isolated,” in that its temporal definition is difficult to immediately ascertain (especially for the contemporary reader), but this very fact also makes it penetrable. It is not hard to presume that many readers would need to be reminded of the actual historical time period of the novel; while the abstract “Middle Ages” is obviously the temporal setting of the novel, its importance is not necessarily the key to understanding the narrative. Certainly understanding the key elements of the historical background of the novel helps to further flesh out the story, a fact which is made clear by the popularity of such books as The Key to the Name of the Rose, Theresa Coletti’s Naming the Rose from 1988, as well as Eco’s own, rather substantial, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, from 1983. But such knowledge is not required in order to begin to read the book. The difficulty for the reader begins, though, with the first introduction of language other than the text of the story; whether we consider the source Italian or the translated English, some of the first words the reader encounters are in French. As the reader continues her journey in the story, she encounters Latin, French, Italian, and the patois of all three as manifest in the speech of the character Salvatore. Rocco Capozzi, in his study of the “unlimited intertextuality” of the novel, writes,
The Song of Songs exists as heterotopia within the novel as well. Foucault states, “There are others [that is, other heterotopias] . . . that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions.” (Foucault 26) It might be that the Song of Songs acts as an “opening” that hides the “exclusion” that is homosexuality. Adso uses the words of the Song of Songs to describe his liaison with the kitchen girl because, first of all, the experience did not occur, and secondly, because he is unable to describe the experience, having never experienced such a liaison. The Song of Songs, then, is a kind of “entry door” as Foucault seems to describe it. In his article, Foucault describes what he calls “famous bedrooms” that existed in South America, as containing an entry door that did not lead to the central chambers in which the family lived, but rather to an open bedroom in which a stranger was allowed to stay, but only for a time, that is, for the evening. Foucault makes a compelling observation: he suggests that these South American bedrooms are akin to the “famous” American hotel rooms in which “illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed into the open.” (26-27) For Adso, the biblical text works as a kind of “entry door” or “open room”: it allows Adso entry but only for a time. It works for him to keep the act isolated or sheltered—the language of the biblical text is not his own text, and thus, shelters him from needing to experience the actual act in reality—and it works for him to keep the act absolutely hidden—he uses the biblical text to mask what has actually happened, by displacing the more immoral experience of homosexuality with the liaison with the kitchen girl, through the lens of the biblical text. As heterotopia, though, the text functions in another way, as an actual, real, example of utopic love, something that is reflected in the text of the novel, while being ignored in the narrative of the novel.
The mirror itself, which Adso encounters in the library, is also a heterotopia. Adso’s first experience of the mirror is described as follows: “Holding the lamp in front of me, I ventured into the next rooms. A giant of threatening dimensions, a swaying and fluttering form came toward me, like a ghost.” For Adso, the mirror is something that, as William explains, “reflects your image, enlarged and distorted.” Adso continues to describe the experience: “I saw our two images, grotesquely misshapen, changing form and height as we moved closer or stepped back.” (Eco 196) Recall Foucault’s description of those spaces that are not the spaces which define the lives of those in society, but rather those spaces that convey something else: they “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” (Foucault 24) In this case, the actual mirror, and its reflection, seems to signify this space, a kind of space of possibility, a possibility with “threatening dimensions, a swaying and fluttering form,” that is, the form of Adso’s fabrication, a sort of reflection of himself that is misshapen. It is a true reflection, yet it is distorted; it is a representation of Adso’s experience of pleasure, but an encounter with Ubertino, which occurs directly before his supposed encounter with the kitchen girl, as described in the narrative.
Another heterotopia is the story of the liaison with the kitchen girl itself. It functions as many of the heterotopia discusses thus far function. It is a heterotopia which neutralizes, which hides “curious exclusions,” to use Foucault’s terms. Foucault also suggests, though, that heterotopias are able to juxtapose “several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” Furthermore, these are heterotopias of deviation, what Foucault describes as “those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.” (25) Certainly Adso’s behaviour is deviant if one considers the liasion with the kitchen girl, and so it seems to function well, then, as a heterotopia. As such, it is a space of experience, where a figure without (prior) experience can express the experience of sexuality, in a space which, in such a way, is utopic, a space of expression of experience. It is a distorted reflection of the actual event between Adso and Ubertino, at the very least an example of sexually charged homosocial behaviour.
The image most closely associated with the heterotopia is a boat, an item at its most comfortable (for lack of a better word) on the sea, in an unfixed position, always swaying to and fro. Foucault states, “the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.” This is a fascinating idea that might be applied to the novel of The Name of the Rose itself. The polysemic nature of the text, the labyrinthian levels and layers of meaning, those spaces of emplacement that are also juxtaposed into sorts of networks of manifest utopia, point to a kind of unfixed text, a space which becomes, as Foucault suggests, “the greatest reserve of the imagination.” If the novel presents chains of heterotopia, then it also presents a real example of the ideal utopia. Without that “greatest reserve of the imagination” which characterizes the novel, Foucault continues, “dreams dry up . . . and the police take the place of the pirates.”
Sources:
Capozzi, Rocco. “Palimpsests and Laughter: The Dialogical Pleasure of Unlimited Intertextuality in The Name of the Rose.” Italica 66:4 (Winter 1989). 412-428.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2006.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986). 22-27.
Haft, Adele J., Jane G. White and Robert J. White, The Key to the Name of the Rose. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1998.
Michel Foucault writes of certain spaces that “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” (Foucault 24) He calls such spaces heterotopias. For Adso, the narrator-protagonist in Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel, The Name of the Rose, the biblical text of the Song of Songs acts as a sort of heterotopia, a mirror which reflects (and distorts) his position; “it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position.” To clarify, there are moments in the novel where Adso’s heterosexuality, a subject position assumed by his piety, by his position in monastic life in the early part of the second millennium, is suspect: “even today my old age is stirred ... when my eyes ... happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden’s.” (Eco 159) At another moment, Adso reflects on an incident of heterosexual impropriety, and uses the text of the Song of Songs in order to deflect, perhaps, suggestions of sexual impropriety in the text. None of this is sure, though; in fact, the novel as a whole seems to enact a sort of heterotopic space. It is what could, what might, but what is not (necessarily).
An article, “Of Other Spaces,” was published in 1986, a translation of Michel Foucault’s lecture, “Des Espaces Autres,” given in March 1967. In the english translation by Jay Miskowiec, Foucault describes a sort of history of space. Of note, he suggests that the “actual” space of the Middle Ages constitutes what he calls a “space of emplacement”: “a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men).” (22) This is an important observation considering the setting for Eco’s novel, that of a monastery in the fourteenth-century. For Foucault, the Middle Ages demonstrated “this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places” in a particularly marked and compelling way. The Middle Ages was an age in which one was strongly placed in a certain space, without possibility for mobility. Each space, also, was marked as what it was, without the possibility of change; categorization of space, and of its occupants, was fixed. As in other areas of Foucault’s study, the study of space reveals power relations.
To only slightly oversimplify, Foucault suggests that the spaces that one lives in that define one’s life are also defined by society, and other power holders and discourse creators and reinforcers. The spaces or sites in which one lives are related to each other: these spaces are through which order is established in society. Foucault states, though, that such mundane sites are not of ultimate interest to him:
I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types. (24)The types to which Foucault refers are “utopia” and “heterotopia.” For Foucault, then, utopia is unreal, a presentation of society “in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case . . . fundamentally unreal spaces.” Heterotopias, on the other hand, are real spaces: “these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.” Between the utopia, which is unreal, and the heterotopia, which is real, is what Foucault calls the mirror. He seems to conflate the two ideas as well: while the heterotopia is reflected or mediated by the mirror, the mirror becomes a sort of heterotopia in itself:
it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the spaces that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (24)The mirror exists in the real world, and thus reflects the unreal idea of utopia in a solid object. Such ideas are compelling if one considers the role of Eco’s own novel—the actual, perhaps physical, idea, or concept, or narrative—as heterotopia: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” (25) For a moment, consider the actual novel, the very narrative that constitutes the reading text. This is a single space of heterotopia, but one can continue the chain. The Song of Songs in the novel acts as heterotopia, the mirror in which Adso sees himself acts as heterotopia, and, ultimately, the story of the kitchen girl acts as heterotopia.
Foucault discusses various principles of heterotopia; one of his principles suggests that “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” (26) Haft, White and White, in their massive work, The Key to the Name of the Rose, suggest that the Middle Ages, that space that Foucault calls a “space of emplacement,” is “an historical ‘open work.’” (Haft, White and White 23) That period has no definitive opening or closing, which works to make the novel itself both “isolated,” in that its temporal definition is difficult to immediately ascertain (especially for the contemporary reader), but this very fact also makes it penetrable. It is not hard to presume that many readers would need to be reminded of the actual historical time period of the novel; while the abstract “Middle Ages” is obviously the temporal setting of the novel, its importance is not necessarily the key to understanding the narrative. Certainly understanding the key elements of the historical background of the novel helps to further flesh out the story, a fact which is made clear by the popularity of such books as The Key to the Name of the Rose, Theresa Coletti’s Naming the Rose from 1988, as well as Eco’s own, rather substantial, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, from 1983. But such knowledge is not required in order to begin to read the book. The difficulty for the reader begins, though, with the first introduction of language other than the text of the story; whether we consider the source Italian or the translated English, some of the first words the reader encounters are in French. As the reader continues her journey in the story, she encounters Latin, French, Italian, and the patois of all three as manifest in the speech of the character Salvatore. Rocco Capozzi, in his study of the “unlimited intertextuality” of the novel, writes,
Eco’s novel is a perfect example of conscious (and unconscious) “hybridization”; it is a text in which many other texts merge, fuse, collide, intersect, speak to, and illuminate, one another—each with its own language and “ideologue.” The Rose, succinctly put, is a skillfull (con)structure of an intentionally ambiguous, polyvalent, and self-reflexive novel intended to generate multiple meanings. Moreover, it is a novel which wishes to be: an intersection of textual “traces” and “textures”; a dialogue with many texts; and a literary text generated through the endless process of writing and reading, re-writing and re-reading, etc. (Capozzi 413)Such discussions of the novel certainly evoke at least the reflection of utopia in the form of heterotopia.
The Song of Songs exists as heterotopia within the novel as well. Foucault states, “There are others [that is, other heterotopias] . . . that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions.” (Foucault 26) It might be that the Song of Songs acts as an “opening” that hides the “exclusion” that is homosexuality. Adso uses the words of the Song of Songs to describe his liaison with the kitchen girl because, first of all, the experience did not occur, and secondly, because he is unable to describe the experience, having never experienced such a liaison. The Song of Songs, then, is a kind of “entry door” as Foucault seems to describe it. In his article, Foucault describes what he calls “famous bedrooms” that existed in South America, as containing an entry door that did not lead to the central chambers in which the family lived, but rather to an open bedroom in which a stranger was allowed to stay, but only for a time, that is, for the evening. Foucault makes a compelling observation: he suggests that these South American bedrooms are akin to the “famous” American hotel rooms in which “illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed into the open.” (26-27) For Adso, the biblical text works as a kind of “entry door” or “open room”: it allows Adso entry but only for a time. It works for him to keep the act isolated or sheltered—the language of the biblical text is not his own text, and thus, shelters him from needing to experience the actual act in reality—and it works for him to keep the act absolutely hidden—he uses the biblical text to mask what has actually happened, by displacing the more immoral experience of homosexuality with the liaison with the kitchen girl, through the lens of the biblical text. As heterotopia, though, the text functions in another way, as an actual, real, example of utopic love, something that is reflected in the text of the novel, while being ignored in the narrative of the novel.
The mirror itself, which Adso encounters in the library, is also a heterotopia. Adso’s first experience of the mirror is described as follows: “Holding the lamp in front of me, I ventured into the next rooms. A giant of threatening dimensions, a swaying and fluttering form came toward me, like a ghost.” For Adso, the mirror is something that, as William explains, “reflects your image, enlarged and distorted.” Adso continues to describe the experience: “I saw our two images, grotesquely misshapen, changing form and height as we moved closer or stepped back.” (Eco 196) Recall Foucault’s description of those spaces that are not the spaces which define the lives of those in society, but rather those spaces that convey something else: they “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” (Foucault 24) In this case, the actual mirror, and its reflection, seems to signify this space, a kind of space of possibility, a possibility with “threatening dimensions, a swaying and fluttering form,” that is, the form of Adso’s fabrication, a sort of reflection of himself that is misshapen. It is a true reflection, yet it is distorted; it is a representation of Adso’s experience of pleasure, but an encounter with Ubertino, which occurs directly before his supposed encounter with the kitchen girl, as described in the narrative.
Another heterotopia is the story of the liaison with the kitchen girl itself. It functions as many of the heterotopia discusses thus far function. It is a heterotopia which neutralizes, which hides “curious exclusions,” to use Foucault’s terms. Foucault also suggests, though, that heterotopias are able to juxtapose “several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” Furthermore, these are heterotopias of deviation, what Foucault describes as “those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.” (25) Certainly Adso’s behaviour is deviant if one considers the liasion with the kitchen girl, and so it seems to function well, then, as a heterotopia. As such, it is a space of experience, where a figure without (prior) experience can express the experience of sexuality, in a space which, in such a way, is utopic, a space of expression of experience. It is a distorted reflection of the actual event between Adso and Ubertino, at the very least an example of sexually charged homosocial behaviour.
The image most closely associated with the heterotopia is a boat, an item at its most comfortable (for lack of a better word) on the sea, in an unfixed position, always swaying to and fro. Foucault states, “the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.” This is a fascinating idea that might be applied to the novel of The Name of the Rose itself. The polysemic nature of the text, the labyrinthian levels and layers of meaning, those spaces of emplacement that are also juxtaposed into sorts of networks of manifest utopia, point to a kind of unfixed text, a space which becomes, as Foucault suggests, “the greatest reserve of the imagination.” If the novel presents chains of heterotopia, then it also presents a real example of the ideal utopia. Without that “greatest reserve of the imagination” which characterizes the novel, Foucault continues, “dreams dry up . . . and the police take the place of the pirates.”
Sources:
Capozzi, Rocco. “Palimpsests and Laughter: The Dialogical Pleasure of Unlimited Intertextuality in The Name of the Rose.” Italica 66:4 (Winter 1989). 412-428.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2006.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986). 22-27.
Haft, Adele J., Jane G. White and Robert J. White, The Key to the Name of the Rose. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1998.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
David Bowie 1947-2016
Yesterday morning, I found out that a very large part of my academic formation and work, died. David Bowie was 69 years old. No one lives forever, but we don't always think of our celebrities as real people. We see them mediated, outside of the normal stream of time. As I write this, I'm listening to Bowie's voice, back from the grave: "Ain't it just like me," he sings.
Back around 1993, I remember hearing the first strains of _Black Tie White Noise_ in an Ottawa CD store, and I walked out with that album. "You've Been Around" was the catalyst that began my academic pursuits, I think. Once _Outside_ came out in 1995, I was hooked. I remember talking to one of my music profs about the music on that album, about what was going on there, the "problem" that needed to be "solved."
Bowie became the subject matter of my Master's thesis. Antonella Bilich Greco and I listened to Bowie constantly during that time, in the TA office at McMaster.
When we saw Bowie in concert in Montreal in 2004, we were told to sit down by those sitting behind us, who seemingly were only there for the hits. And we did.
When I had the opportunity to revisit some of my earlier scholarship for the book, I happily did so, (re)discovering that Bowie was still the "problem" that needed to be "solved," and a delightful one at that.
Yesterday was a whirlwind, with something like eight media interviews throughout the day, not to mention a blurb for a Greek daily newspaper. And then a first class.
We don't know these celebrities, but we feel like we do. Yesterday, my friends and colleagues sent messages of condolence and stopped by my office. And I thank them for that.
And I thank David Bowie for his music. If it wasn't for him, I'm pretty confident to say that I wouldn't be the scholar--or the person--I am today.
Back around 1993, I remember hearing the first strains of _Black Tie White Noise_ in an Ottawa CD store, and I walked out with that album. "You've Been Around" was the catalyst that began my academic pursuits, I think. Once _Outside_ came out in 1995, I was hooked. I remember talking to one of my music profs about the music on that album, about what was going on there, the "problem" that needed to be "solved."
Bowie became the subject matter of my Master's thesis. Antonella Bilich Greco and I listened to Bowie constantly during that time, in the TA office at McMaster.
When we saw Bowie in concert in Montreal in 2004, we were told to sit down by those sitting behind us, who seemingly were only there for the hits. And we did.
When I had the opportunity to revisit some of my earlier scholarship for the book, I happily did so, (re)discovering that Bowie was still the "problem" that needed to be "solved," and a delightful one at that.
Yesterday was a whirlwind, with something like eight media interviews throughout the day, not to mention a blurb for a Greek daily newspaper. And then a first class.
We don't know these celebrities, but we feel like we do. Yesterday, my friends and colleagues sent messages of condolence and stopped by my office. And I thank them for that.
And I thank David Bowie for his music. If it wasn't for him, I'm pretty confident to say that I wouldn't be the scholar--or the person--I am today.
Sunday, January 03, 2016
Happy New Year!
Well, now I'm 42 (my birthday was on December 27) and 2015 is history. I wish I would have finished Smith's book on desire and culture, but the busy-ness of the school term got the best of me. I thought I'd post a quick note at the start of the new year.
What is on my horizon in 2016? Academically, there are a few things: I hope to present at the Popular Culture Association of Canada annual conference (in collaboration with the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada) in Montreal in May; at the end of May, I'm planning to attend the International Association for the Study of Popular Music joint conference of the Canadian and American branches in Calgary (taking place during Congress); and finally, I am hoping to hear from a publisher about moving forward on a major study of U2 and cosmopolitanism.
I'm teaching three courses, starting in a week: Popular Music and Culture, Media in Crisis: Print and Radio, and Principles of Journalism. I am looking forward to teaching Popular Music. I've never taught this one alone, but it is sort of my specialty (at least on paper).
As for personally, I don't really have many wants. I'd love to buy myself an "expensive" watch (a Seiko SARB065 "Cocktail Time - Cool" to be exact). Even $500 seems a really crazy price for a watch, but it's so nice looking! I'd like to buy myself a big comfy chair from IKEA, but there is no room for it in our house or in my office at school. Probably, we'll have to buy a new home computer, and we'll be travelling to Ontario to visit family around the conferences in May. No vacations this summer, but maybe we'll begin planning for Summer 2017 and WDW.
Here's to 2016: may it bring hope and happiness and hearts' desires.
What is on my horizon in 2016? Academically, there are a few things: I hope to present at the Popular Culture Association of Canada annual conference (in collaboration with the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada) in Montreal in May; at the end of May, I'm planning to attend the International Association for the Study of Popular Music joint conference of the Canadian and American branches in Calgary (taking place during Congress); and finally, I am hoping to hear from a publisher about moving forward on a major study of U2 and cosmopolitanism.
I'm teaching three courses, starting in a week: Popular Music and Culture, Media in Crisis: Print and Radio, and Principles of Journalism. I am looking forward to teaching Popular Music. I've never taught this one alone, but it is sort of my specialty (at least on paper).
As for personally, I don't really have many wants. I'd love to buy myself an "expensive" watch (a Seiko SARB065 "Cocktail Time - Cool" to be exact). Even $500 seems a really crazy price for a watch, but it's so nice looking! I'd like to buy myself a big comfy chair from IKEA, but there is no room for it in our house or in my office at school. Probably, we'll have to buy a new home computer, and we'll be travelling to Ontario to visit family around the conferences in May. No vacations this summer, but maybe we'll begin planning for Summer 2017 and WDW.
Here's to 2016: may it bring hope and happiness and hearts' desires.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Karla Adolphe - Live at The Space EP
I first encountered Karla Adolphe, a singer-songwriter from High River, Alberta, when she played for a chapel service at Providence University College in Otterburne, Manitoba, a few years ago. I was immediately taken by this compelling and emotive performer. In concert, with only her voice and her guitar, she seemed to express a kind of victory despite loss, or an acceptance despite loneliness: her Christian faith was clearly present in that it allowed her to overcome the various difficulties that she experienced.
This was particularly evident during her last visit to Providence a couple of years ago, during which she expressed the difficulties she faced in the flooding of her house, and her community, in the floods of June 2013. She expressed how difficult the rebuilding process was for her, and as she presented her stories, I became part of her story: my own troubles (certainly not as difficult as her--and her family'--experiences) came to mind and I realized that our journeys in life, though unique to each of us, were more similar than different. And if she could overcome despite, then, perhaps, so could I.
When I found out that Karla Adolphe was putting out a live EP, I was excited. The five-song EP was recorded live at The Space, "a sound stage, post-production house and a recording studio" located in Red Deer, Alberta. The tracks feature Adolphe and her guitar, as well as a sparse band and complementary background vocals. Other than that, the production is light, and so the performance remains intimate and very easy to listen to.
The first track, "Trouble Won't Go," is a rousing number, evocative of a spiritual, a song that seems to bring to the forefront life's difficulties: "Ain't no refuge but you, my God." With all of the talk of levees breaking and earth eroding away, it is easy to make a connection (at least thematically) with Adolphe's own experiences in the 2013 floods. But her decision is to hold still in the arms of God. Her proclamation is loud and definitive. She will do this despite.
"Magnolia," a preview of the title track on her upcoming full-length release, begins with a couple of guitars and fingersnaps for percussion, and then Adolphe's blues-infused delivery. This song is a bit of a "soft" scorcher, that is until the chorus begins with the declaration of "I will rise up!" Again, the theme of victory in the face of looming defeat is strong. To say that the song is an encouragement is too strong: the song is a call of desperation, and a call to join together with her to yell at defeat and to tell it to go away.
Her rendition of "Ice Road," originally released on Honeycomb Tombs from 2012, is imbued with a positive energy not present on the studio recording. Though equally beautiful, the original is sad and sparse, evoking the loneliness of an ice road journey itself. This version seems to anticipate the arrival to a destination. Adolphe has now "gotten through," her desire throughout the song.
"No Grounds For Love" is soft and gentle, and reminds this listener of Feist's work, though with Adolphe's vocal power. It is a beautiful song which really demonstrates how talented a performer Karla Adolphe really is. She is able to disarm the listener: through her vulnerability, she makes the listener vulnerable. We are affected by her emotions. In the sonic spaces of the song, beneath and through the voice we hear, we breath, realizing that we are all on a similar journey through life.
Once I got to the last song, "Child of the King," I was saddened. It wasn't because of the triumphant sorts of declarations that Adolphe proclaims here; she continues to express this sort of victory despite. Rather, I know that the EP is over. Karla, we need a full-length, live, one-take, one-guitar, one-voice album. We need more of that spoken and sung victory despite so that we can continue to realize that we are not alone.
Until then, I suppose this will do.
You can pre-order/purchase both Digital Downloads and Physical CDs at http://www.karlaadolphe.bandcamp.com.
Look forward to Magnolia, a full-length album from Karla Adolphe, coming in March 2016. For more information on wonderful Karla Adolphe, see her website at http://www.karlaadolphe.com.
Friday, October 09, 2015
Affective Images
Smith explores the power of narrative in media (as well as narrative in advertising, in ”iconic” representations at a mall) as ”affective images,” which, in turn, affect our telos, the direction of our desire. (58) Further, habits are trained by ritual, precognitive actions of the body. He states:
Over time, rituals and practices--often in tandem with aesthetic phenomena like pictures and stories--mold and shape our precognitive disposition by training our desires. (59)Interestingly, Smith suggests that, thinking back to Christian education, if the religious academy is concerned with "worldview," it might also want to be concerned with the "unconscious" (residing close to the sites of desire), which informs it. (61)
Wednesday, October 07, 2015
The Precognitive Engine
How does our desire get pointed in the right direction--the right version--of human flourishing? Smith concludes:
a desire for and orientation to a particular vision of the good life (the kingdom) becomes operative in us (motivating actions, decisions, etc.) by becoming an integral part of the fabric of our dispositions--our precognitive tendencies to act in certain ways and toward certain ends. Philosophers like Aristotle, Aquinas, and MacIntyre describe such dispositions as "habits." (55)They can be so intrinsic to our existence that we might think that they are natural (not unlike ideologies or Barthes' myths). It is this "precognitive engine," as Smith calls it, that directs us to do either the right thing or the wrong thing (perhaps simplified a little too much here). (56) But this "precognitive engine" is made, not necessarily given to us. But this doesn't yet answer the question: where does the "precognitive engine" get made? How is it modified?
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