Quotations: invention, imitation, transposition

Randy Cohen: What is benign in one setting can be toxic in another. (Chainsaws: useful in the forest, dubious at the dinner table. Or as Dr. Johnson put it in a pre-chainsaw age, “A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.”) (*)

Malcolm Gladwell: "I have two parallel things I'm interested in: collecting interesting stories and collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is where they overlap."

Jean-Luc Godard: It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.

Jonathan Lethem: Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul--let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks? "The Ecstasy of Influence" Harper's Magazine, Feb. 2007, p. 68.

Pablo Neruda: "Writers are always interchanging in some way, just as the air we breathe doesn’t belong to one place. The writer is always moving from house to house: he ought to change his furniture. Some writers feel uncomfortable at this. I remember that Federico García Lorca was always asking me to read my lines, my poetry, and yet in the middle of my reading, he would say, “Stop, stop! Don’t go on, lest you influence me!" (Paris Review, The Art of Poetry 14)

Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it's by standing on ye shoulders of Giants," in a letter to Robert Hooke

John Padgett and Woody Powell: Emergence of novelty is not virgin birth. Everything, even the origin of life itself, is a combination and recombination of other things in its accessible context... Understanding the emergence of objects, therefore, is a matter of deconstructing objects into the transformational flows that construct and sustain them. Viewed from the perspective of flows, objects are the folding and refolding of their context – namely, of the ecology or network of other objects with which those objects interact... For example, stability of the human body through time means not mechanical fixity of parts; it means organic reproduction of parts in flux. Viewed as chemical reactions, we are vortexes in the material life that wends through us all. (*) (forthcoming The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Princeton U. Press)

Janwillem van de Wetering: The Daimyo : "What would I be? A good question. I have no answer. My mind is clouded by the countless thoughts with which I have identified myself and which have all left their traces." (*) (an interview)

Harrison White: You can be assured that, for each idea, quite a number of substantial, and often independent, discussions and implementations could be cited: Ideas that have any importance, any impact, do, after all, come in company, not as isolates, and the essayist is mostly a transcriber of ideas abroad in his networks" (1994a, p. 4) in Emirbayer 1997

Eric Hoffer: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things, have even discovered them over and over again and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways. 1960, from his notebooks.

The Books:

Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase (spoilers)

"Sometimes I get lonely
Sleeping with you," she said.
"Just great," I said, "Just great."
I was already lost.
She was the kind of girl
That'd sleep with anyone,
I was mediocre,
But OK about it.
It was improbable
That such a person as
Myself could be living,
That such a relation
As ours could last for long.

Another girl, with an
Auricular something,
"You know nothing," she said,
"For sure," I said, "For sure."
On a wild sheep chase,
Ovine totemism,
A vital dynamo,
A fixed point in time space.
Points have no names nor selves,
Suspended over all,
Sheep have both,
A Will, a whip, a host,
Scourging blood for weakness.
"People are weak," I said.
"You don't know this thing," he said,
Gangrene rot worsening,
"That exists in the world."

"Where's the time go?" she asked,
We were close then,
Closer than ever, before the end.
"Time adds up for us," I said,
"But it does not expand,"
No, time does not expand.
Time trails off into death,
Darkness alone shifting,
Like mercury motion,
Voiceless snow falling soft,
Afterward all silent,
Inexpressible cleave.
Getting back to normal,
On a cold, concrete sea,
All alone with the dead,
And ears to hear the waves.

Note: this is "plagiarized" from the text, more of a tessellation of quotes than a novel effort.

Too much text

from Pedro Pernias

Michener's Sayonara (spoilers)

Hana-ogi:

Rroyd, Rhroyd,

When you kissed me at Bitchi-bashi,
A good punishing smooch,
I knew you were the tall stud of substance,
I had longed and waited for.

It was but the work of a moment to,
Lay your head in my lap,
Then tumble you by the Shinto shrine.
You felt millions of eyes on you,
But had eyes only for my golden glamour.

You could no more resist carnal thrill,
Than the revelation of whole to whole,
The cohabitation of one in another.
We needed no common tongue to build,
A world away, rapturous, and auto-catalyzing.

But you, you simple and lovable fool,
With your beefhead Broadway blathering,
Dreaming yourself an architect, of setting me free,

Unwilling to forsake your foundation,

Yet demanding it of me.

In the end it was eyes you lacked,
For my, our, the multivocality,
And your own home-love hypocrisy.
Japan was never a place for you,
You were a place for Japan.

And so when your friend blew his brains out,
And mine stuck a knife through her neck,
I went to Tokyo knowing the future.
A succession of small rooms and big stages,
Discipline, promotion, bellicosity,

And an end to love.

Roy Gruver:

Hayano-chan,
Lo the postillion,
Takusan-love for the tadpole on my pillow,
I'm the one's been struck by lightning,
That will never strike again.

Note: First of a series of poems on books I read.

I want clean blood

I want clean blood
Break through the scab
Shine through
Translucent patina
Smog slab
And beneath
An ocean of incarnadine.

A spoken triplet

You’re a residential nomad,

You bring your house with you,

You’re a hermit crab.

The Books noticed me

Something amazing has probably happened. The refracted light of maybe-greatness has struck me dumb. Here are the details:

I saw a concert by The Books at Cornell Cinema, Ithaca, NY on March 31 2010.

Then I wrote a reflective article (see the previous post) on the experience and The Books artistic process for my radio station's blog at Syracuse, WERW 1570 Word Press, of which I was editor.

I posted the following blurb on The Books' Facebook fan page.

Though heroically unlikely, I'd love if you (The Books, but also anyone else) would read my (pseudo) intellectual piece on your music and show of March 31st at Cornell. Found here.

Yesterday Nick Zammuto or Paul de Jong of the duo The Books or somebody else representing The Books or representing Zammuto's new project read the article and wrote:

Bradley... thats such a bad ass article you wrote man! seriously... one the best i ever saw! good work! Please take some time to check out Nick's new project... the new album comes out April 3rd 2012 under Temporary Residence! hope you enjoy man!

I responded:

This really means a lot to me. It really does. I had a saccharine freak out, flying around the apartment whooping, smiling like enlightenment. And as verbose as my old writing is. And my new writing, come to think of it. Thank you for the attention and the kind words. All best wishes to both of you and best of luck on the new venture. You have my support.

I hope it wasn't mere promotion and that somebody (preferably Zammuto or de Jong) actually read the piece and means what they wrote. It's nice to be recognized, especially by those you admire.

The Books: collectors and collage makers

It was a soggy evening. We were late, but only barely. Our tickets greeted us at the door. Our seats were up a coiling stairway into the bowls of Cornell Cinema, Ithaca, NY. I had gone for a preparatory pee, and let my companions precede me. When I entered the murky second-tier seating, I was ambivalent to discombobulated isolation. Music and video assailed me: The Books in full 2D, 3D, and auditory assault.

The Books are a New York City-based duo, consisting of Nick Zammuto--guitar, vox, bass--and Paul de Jong--cello with great vigor. He broke a string during the performance (and also played bass on one song). Live, they jam over and in sync with their electronic music. Synchronized videos act like pulsing semaphores, conveying independent messages and impressions. The overall effect is stunning and distinctive. For me, the songs and videos bled into one overwhelming and mesmerizing farrago.

The Books are masters of recreation and transformation – what they have deigned to call “auditory mosaic” or “collage music.” They think little of disciplinary or stylistic rigidity, and they are unlikely to be dogmatic about much of anything except originality and quality. They are mixed-media innovators and tinkerers. Zammuto claims to have installed amplifiers in filing cabinets in order to explore metallic resonance. Their art and speech are redolent of eclecticism and artistic postmodernism.

During a Q&A session after the Cornell set, Zammuto mused on the role of language: its inevitable and undeniable power and yet its certain sterility and inherent limitations. It is, he claimed, the best single tool for human communication, but it still can't beat the whole toolbox.

For The Books, language is crucial to song and video composition. However, the words they sing and embed as electronic samples do not primarily explain, predict, or commentate; Zammuto rejected the view of their music as social and political utterance. In this sense, the words they use constitute one of many instruments, used to evoke a range of intellectual and emotional responses – awe, humor, curiosity, etc. And instead of invent, evaluate, and pontificate, The Books collect and they channel.

Zammuto touted de Jong aptitude as a “great collector” of words and not just video. They collect material from thrift stores, even collaborate with other collectors, and mine information from prosaic situations. Their track "Motherless Bastard," they claim, uses real-time video and audio recording from a fast food restaurant.

Be that as it may, language and video in The Books invoke emotion in a way distinct from, say, one of de Jong’s cello solos. Creative force and selectivity guide their composition process. And deciding what to show and not show, how to arrange, distort, and emphasize imply a purpose which is more profound than exhibitionism. There's no escaping artistic intent. And as much as they try to counteract or discount the view, Zammuto and de Jong recognize their role as politicized, social commentators.

The song “Be Good to Them Always,” demonstrates the point. The lyrics are, “I can hear a collective rumbling in America/ I’ve lost my house, you’ve lost your house/ I don’t suppose it matters which way we go/ This great society is going smash.”

Naturally, when I heard this song for the first time in Winter 2008, I assumed it was new – composed and recorded after the big bust. In fact, it is from the album “Lost and Safe,” released in 2005. I then, ahistorically, thought of the lyrics as eerily prescient. But even this view is befuddled. The lyrics are sung in concert with dialogue samples from the-devil-knows-when. Ergo, the samples and thus the song had no intended connection to today’s economic ills. They can't have. And yet, the song is both relevant and timely.

The genius of The Books consists of uniting disparate samples, re-casting them, and embedding them in a new context. Their method would be analogous to that of the antiques collector but for their general agnosticism toward origin. Jean-Luc Godard was supposed to have said it: "It's not where you take things from--It's where you take them to." The Books strive more to create a new and stimulating combinatory artifacts than to comment on the understanding of the past, or present, or future.

Sitting in Cornell Cinema, all senses attuned, I found my brain clouded by thoughts – unfortunate distractions, which interjected themselves between me and the performance. The intellectual and social components kept cropping up, forcing me to translate my experience into language. What did I really think? What was I feeling? What was I going to say to my friends during the unavoidable post-show break-down?

I couldn’t escape these thoughts, and yet I kept reflecting that the kaleidoscopic performance was beyond words; that words were woefully inadequate. I finally abandoned the intellectual exercise, and yielded to the music, the videos, the faces of the performers, the furious pumping of de Jong’s leg keeping beat. I let the full range of emotions overmaster me, and decided that if talk was called for later, I'd recall, ruminate, craft some response.

But when it came time to dissect the show, walking back to the car in the rain, murmurs of wonder and appreciation were forthcoming, but there was surprisingly little to say. The Books had said it all for us.

-Brad Turner, of Brad and the Unbounded One, Wednesdays 9-11pm on WERW
Originally 3 April 2012, WERE Blog