J. H. Prynne
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- 100 god damn pages butchering sontag cooking with propane corpsey why are you so thick deaths from bromo-dragonfly enjoy your journey enjoy! everyone! gravity bong happy to help! jamaican voodoo gang from predator 2 lads vs. dudes martin anus shaun from delaware stoned modernism teat. the albert ayler of the recorder the bee is the messiah the path clears by the use it gets thick as fuck to pollen traitor cow-juice west coast dudes
I'm rereading Against Interpretation atm and between that and Prynne it's really exposed how programmed I am to read a certain way. Always looking behind, over and past what's on the page in search of meaning. I think it's partly because I like to discuss things with others and reading things that way generates discussion. It's reading that follows Ashbee's description of postmodern art in that Art Bollocks piece Craner posted,
This is not art to be looked at; this is art to talk about and write about. It doesn't reward visual attention; it generates text. In that, it is the model for much art since the '60s, which we have come to call post-modern: art as a machine for producing language.
Sontag makes the point that at one point we didn't ask what a work of art said because we knew what it did. That seems to be what Prynne's forcing me to wrangle with whenever I pick him up. He's forcing me to read differently. It's uncomfortable, but in a good way.
This is not art to be looked at; this is art to talk about and write about. It doesn't reward visual attention; it generates text. In that, it is the model for much art since the '60s, which we have come to call post-modern: art as a machine for producing language.
Sontag makes the point that at one point we didn't ask what a work of art said because we knew what it did. That seems to be what Prynne's forcing me to wrangle with whenever I pick him up. He's forcing me to read differently. It's uncomfortable, but in a good way.
Reading a lot of Pynchon's complicated this stuff for me as with him he's more or less telling you there's stuff going on beneath the surface and encouraging you to excavate. That being said, I've never done Marxist readings of stuff or whatever. It's more just "What do they mean by this?" and mulling over what things represent rather than forcing it all through a specific lens. It's still contingent on the idea that what's being said isn't what's really being said though. That what they're trying to communicate is encrypted.
I flounder when trying not to interpret this stuff. It's incredibly difficult not to latch onto certain words and ideas and use them as a point of reference. I don't know how to discuss it any other way. I can't even envisage another way of reading something unless it's just a straightforward story where it's all laid out with no room for interpretation. How do you read Eliot or whatever without instinctively wondering what it might be about?
It appeals to my internet brain where everything's referencing everything else and that's how I understand things. Prynne's much more self-contained. I have to go into his environment. Pynchon's environment's everywhere. It's as much outside the book for me as inside. Prynne's like a portal to somewhere utterly alien.
luka
Well-known member
For example
I haven't gotten that from him at all. He hasn't given me enough to know where to look.
I have this with Joyce too actually. It doesn't feel as though the references really lead anywhere the way they do with Pynchon. When he does a pun on a Latin verse or something, it doesn't feel as though my looking it up will carry much weight whereas Pynchon namedropping Allen Dulles leads you down a crazy rabbit hole involving the OSS, CIA, JFK etc.
I still need to read that. I've got it bookmarked.