Popular Modernism

[version]

Apparently this was something Mark talked about. I like the sound of it. Maybe I've gotten the wrong end of the stick but it seems as though the idea is essentially "make it new" but reasonably accessible so that you actually have an audience? That thing of being able to make something weird/challenging which people actually like is something I've always admired in Kubrick, Timbaland/The Neptunes, Aphex, Apocalypse Now etc.

 

[luka]

Pulp modernism was the phrase he used.

 

[luka]

So for instance he couldn't tolerate anything literary. Ballard and Burroughs and Mark E Smith were fine but Joyce or Pound or Eliot was verboten.

 

[version]

What was his issue with them? That they were elitist?

 

[luka]

It's the same impulse that lead so many people to identify the true cutting edge with the hardcore continuum, Timbaland, etc over anything self consciously experimental.

 

[luka]

What was his issue with them? That they were elitist?

Class anxiety/resentment. That literature belonged to the elite.

 

[version]

I'm on the fence because I like Joyce and that sort of stuff but I get the argument. Although some people seem to feel Joyce wasn't elitist because he was into farts and bodies and jokes too.

 

[luka]

I don't think it's an argument. I think it's a reaction.

 

[version]

I guess you could also read that stuff as "I'm so smart I've gone past the other smart people and talk about this stuff instead" too though, plus the books are difficult.

 

[version]

I don't think it's an argument. I think it's a reaction.

Isn't every argument a reaction? You can't argue in a vacuum.

 

[luka]

http://k-punk.org/memorex-for-the-krakens-the-falls-pulp-modernism/

 

[luka]

Isn't every argument a reaction? You can't argue in a vacuum.

I mean a knee jerk reaction. A reflex. Not a reasoned response.

 

[version]

You have any sympathy for it?

 

[luka]

Yeah course I do. He liked Beckett a lot too so it's not a consistent position.

 

[luka]

Lots of things in life feel like they belong to them. Your betters. And unless you're the queen everyone in the whole country will feel they have their betters looking down at them.

 

[version]

"If something is too alien, it will fail to register; if it is too easily recognized, too easily cognizable, it will never be more than a reiteration of the already known."

This sounds right at first glance, but thinking about it I'm not sure. I guess it depends what he means by register. The shock of the new seems to be something registering with great force precisely because it's so alien.

 

[shiels]

You have any sympathy for it?

I do. He talked a lot about the old NME and BBC as platforms that allowed for populist stuff that was also challenging. Public spheres that were supportive of experimentation. It's about stuff being made to move things forward for us all, the commons, rather than making stuff to carve out a career or impress a few

 

[shiels]

So for instance he couldn't tolerate anything literary. Ballard and Burroughs and Mark E Smith were fine but Joyce or Pound or Eliot was verboten.

i wonder would he like sally rooney

“literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”

 

[version]

The Fall extend and performatively critique that mode of high modernism by reversing the impersonation of working class accent, dialect and diction that, for example, Eliot performed in The Waste Land.

This reminds me of what one of my mates said about a bunch of the most aggressively political students he went to uni with being white and wealthy and constantly taking it upon themselves to speak on behalf of everyone else.

 

[version]

i wonder would he like sally rooney

Is that from Normal People? I keep hearing about that book.