Kip Manley's Blog, page 46
January 28, 2016
Things to keep in mind (The secret of bingeing)
In my view, Aristotle misconstrues what epic is trying to do. The episodes aren’t a distraction, they’re the whole point. The overarching story provides a narrative and thematic frame for the episodes, allowing multiple stories to come together into a larger, cohesive whole. The frame narrative is necessarily sparse and even boring, as Aristotle’s famous reductive summary of the Odyssey illustrates, but it’s necessary to keep the episodes from being purely episodic, arbitrarily juxtaposed narrative fragments.
At its best, binge-watchable serial drama is trying to be an epic. Within each season, we have an overarching plot that makes room for several narratively and thematically related episodes. The story of Don Draper’s secret identity gives us a window into the worlds of Peggy and all the other beloved supporting cast, just as Tony Soprano’s quest to become the undisputed boss opens up a narrative world full of fascinating characters.
I’ve written before about Main Character Syndrome, the phenomenon of viewers becoming bored and even resentful of the main character of the framing narrative, and I believe that the fundamentally epic structure of binge-watchable serial drama explains why that is such a constant pitfall. It’s a difficult balance to keep the framing narrative thin enough to allow for rich episodic side-trips but compelling enough that you don’t get impatient with it. Arguably even Homer fails on this point — once it comes time to settle accounts with the primary story of Odysseus coming home to claim what’s his (the beginning of book 13), it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room.
The balance is easier to strike within a single season, as the Mad Men and Sopranos examples make clear.
January 22, 2016
No. 26: only borders lie (Closing)
the Silhouette in the doorway – echoes
January 20, 2016
No. 26: only borders lie (Act IV)
“Put that away” – a Scream – unfinished Business –
January 18, 2016
No. 26: only borders lie (Act III)
across the Lot – what Needs must – Duty –
January 15, 2016
No. 26: only borders lie (Act II)
A black Duffel, dragged – Three out of Five – with Her in the room – not King nor Court –
January 13, 2016
No. 26: only borders lie (Act I)
“Does it hurt?” – before the Sun – her Grace; his Lady – Back-slaps & Glad-hands – the Candidates –
January 11, 2016
No. 26: only borders lie (Opening)
the Two ways This might go –
December 23, 2015
Things to keep in mind (The secret of language)
Interestingly, the work which MacFarlane looks at which breaks most obviously with this conception of precision is the one which is often cited as an ur-text for the lyrical prosaic form practiced by the present crop of nature writers: J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. In the chapter dedicated to him, MacFarlane immediately offers a sign which serves to distinguish Baker, remarking that he reveals himself to be “a good writer but a rather bad birdwatcher”. Throughout this chapter, despite a couple of extremely tenuous attempts to tar him with the same brush, the word precision is curiously absent. Baker’s myopia is both literal and linguistic. He is a brilliant writer but he is anything but precise. Instead his prose seems to stem from urgency, disorientation, and desperation. His landscape is one which is drawn with compass points but no more, it remains loose and elusive. His peregrinations are cartographically inchoate. Baker continually upsets the even, leisurely syntax and spacing of his fellow nature writers, his prose is an expressionistic and feverish thirst which seemingly cannot be quenched. He often turns nouns into verbs and adjectives, wilfully ignoring the conventions of language, painting his observations in loose obsessive strokes. His prosaic obsessiveness recalls the pictorial desolation of Van Gogh: the falcon’s kill is his yellow paint and, at one stage, we worry he might decide to eat. One does not need to know that Baker was suffering from a slowly encroaching paralysis, or that he was sacrificing his own financial stability and health in his search: his hunger is evident on every page. Like Federigo degli Alberighi in the Decameron, Baker spends the whole of his substance: he has nothing but the falcon.
What sets Baker apart then is that, for him, writing has a transformative aspect. His desire is to become the peregrine. In this sense, unlike the other writers in Landmarks (and unlike its author), Baker’s writing is not a (re)-turn towards nature but a turning away from it. Baker seeks to shed the humanity which he finds so abhorrent but it is not nature which allows him to do this: it is writing. Baker wishes to negate the distance between the human and the animal, to lose his physical form and become the animal he hunts. At some point the all-seeing ‘I’, that solid conquering subject which plants nature writing so firmly within the turf of the political status quo, begins to slip. Baker recognises the exteriority of his being to that of nature and that he must turn to something else if he is to try to express this separation. In this sense his prose is an act of ritual, of magic, of re-enchantment. There is something prehistoric about it. Like those painters who daubed the walls of Lascaux in order to commune with the animalistic existence which still haunted them, Baker seeks to use his words in order to shed his human form, to gain, in Bataille’s words, ‘the silence of the beast’, and take flight. But, most importantly, he recognises that this ritual, this turn towards language, too can only be a failure. The ‘We’ of communion with the hawk is illusory and Baker knows he will always remain part of the ‘we’ who ‘stink of death’. Writing and the material cannot be connected, there is space between them. By not recognising this disjunct, the preservation of these words, these memories of landscape, may too easily function as their memorial.
What, then, is it which ultimately makes the language of Landmarks an act of preservation in its most pejorative sense: pickled, sweetened, displayed? Is it its refulgence, its fertility, its abundance? Certainly, that constitutes part of the problem, but what seems to underlie this fecundity is the assumption of a direct correlation between landscape and language. Despite the weak protestations MacFarlane offers, he never questions the assumption that reality, a reality full of objects to be conquered and collected, is merely there. It lacks the interrogative lacuna, the space between, which literature requires. The problem with MacFarlane’s language, and the language of nature writing, is that it posits a direct relationship between the sounds and syntaxes of our words and the natural world of our experience.
December 15, 2015
Things to keep in mind (The secret of æsthetics)
Having pored over a stack of past issues, I would argue that F--rie endeavors to cultivate in readers a quality of attention that registers the most diminutive details, that perceives the world as though under a spell. In an article about throwing “a magical midsummer night’s dream party,” the writer suggests inscribing guests’ names on “small leaves, bark, or beautiful pieces of fruit like green apples or small Japanese eggplants.” And in a homage to green tea, editor at large Laren Stover writes, “If you have a glass teapot, you can watch the pearls release and open like magical tendrils, mermaid’s hair or seaweed unfurling, deepening the water to emerald green.” This state of amplified, granular awareness, in which time slows as you watch the “undulating ballet in your teapot,” is one I have otherwise only achieved with psychedelic drugs.
F--rie’s overarching æsthetic, which I’ve spent more time parsing than I care to admit, is rather hallucinogenic itself: a mash-up of Medieval, Renaissance and Victorian influences, with hints of Celtic and classical Greco-Roman mythology and a little neo-paganism tossed in for good measure. F--ry tales, with their familiar signifiers and peculiar, unsettling dream logic, are useful shorthand for understanding the magazine’s visuals. The models sport scarlet Little Red Riding Hood cloaks or spectral white Miss Havisham frocks; they lie supine on leafy forest floors or gaze into the middle distance from snowy, windswept landscapes. In one 18-page spread shot by the Russian photographer Katerina Plotnikova, adolescent women in poufy-sleeved taffeta dresses embrace foxes and elk. (The editors have a fondness for interspecies images.) What’s startling about the photos is the élan with which they yoke together an innocent childhood id with ambitious, adult-word production: Thus a model in a lace-bodice gown wraps an actual fox around her neck like a fur stole; and 17th-century women with powdered bouffant wigs picnic at the bottom of the ocean while a pair of puffy white poodles look on.
Amanda Fortini
December 7, 2015
no. 26: “ – only borders lie – ”
A challenge is issued, and Jo must answer for it. “Still there now.” 36 pages with color cover. $3.00 plus shipping and handling.
the Two ways This might go – “Does it hurt?” – before the Sun – her Grace; his Lady – Back-slaps & Glad-hands – the Candidates – A black Duffel, dragged – Three out of Five – with Her in the room – not King nor Court – across the Lot – what Needs must – Duty – “Put that away” – a Scream – unfinished Business – the Silhouette in the doorway – echoes
