Saturday, February 27, 2010

Control

In a new blog post, Adam Curtis discusses the problems with economics and the difficulty of treating the socio-political sphere as if it was a machine. This repeats arguments advanced in his series The Trap and Pandora's Box - that the Thatcherite/laisser-faire (and even Blairite) project of marketizing all aspects of public life (education, the health service, social services, etc) is not truly a freeing, but the construction of an incredibly complex network of measurements, penalties, and rewards, all of which are susceptible to manipulation by the people involved (politicians, managers, staff) who gain rewards or punishments depending on the data fed into the system; inspired by cybernetics, feedback engineering, and systems theory.

One good example is British railways. Before privatisation, almost the entire railway system was run by a single entity, British Rail, which combined passenger and freight operations, rolling stock, track, stations, safety, planning, staffing, and all other aspects of running a railway. The 1993 railways act broke British Rail into over 100 companies: the track is controlled by one company, which contracts out maintenance, and train services are put on by a number of different companies, who lease rolling stock from other companies. A hugely complex bureaucracy is required to adjudicate between all these organisations: train operators are penalised for unpunctual trains, but have found tricks like cancelling trains or adjusting timetables that can be used to manipulate the metrics. Subsidies doubled in real terms from 1994 (just before privatisation) to 2005, with no increase in punctuality or quality of service. Wikipedia has a good summary.

As a result you do not have a free-market system where people are free to innovate and provide new services; you have a huge costly bureaucracy which constrains people into maximising semi-arbitrary metrics rather than competing directly for customers. Of course, with a railway system, it is hard to allow two operators to run rival services and compete against each other, but this reduces the choices to state ownership or unregulated monopoly (with each company building their own lines, as happened in the 19th century). The present system is neither free enterprise nor state control, but the worst of both worlds. The toughest question is why such a system exists: when railway privatisation was planned, some people wanted BR privatised as 1 or 4 companies, but the Adam Smith Institute, a group of right-wing semi-libertarian ideologues pushed for the bizarre system now in place. Their reasoning remains opaque: it cannot be motivated by naive laisser-faire economics, but can only be a product, as Curtis suggests, of strange counter-intuitive ideas lifted mistakenly from cybernetics about how a complex system of data flows (and money flows) can produce a self-regulatory system, little considering the effects on either the cost of the system or the services it provides.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Who's up in Lady Gaga's crotch?

Popjustice have got hold of the seating plans for this year's Brit Awards, the UK record industry jolly held on February 16 this year. There were platinum tables rated A to E and mere gold tables from F to J. As PopJustice points out, the seating assignments say a lot about the state of the British music and media industries.

There were many top-class A tables for Sony (18, plus 2 Sony/ATV publishers and 2 Sony Ericsson) and Universal/UMTV (17) and fewer for Polydor (6), with 6 Warner Bros/Music/Chapell tables scattered around from A to C, and 7 EMI tables in B. Mastercard/Barclays (chief sponsors) and BPI/Brits (organisers) filled out much of B and C. ITV who broadcast the ceremony had 12 good tables (A and B) - 5 for Brand and Commercial, 2 for ITV Entertainment, and the rest spread across Commissioning, Corporate Comms, Productions, Public Affairs, and ITV2; the BBC had just 2 (one for Radio 1 and the other for Talents and Rights Negotiation) and Sky and Channel 4 one each.

Here are some of the other attendees, divided by class of table (A is right up in front of the stage, B behind, C and D in a semicircle behind that, right up to J and K at the very back):

A: 3 tables for Island; 2 for Atlantic; 2 for Mercury music group, 1 each for CAA (talent agency), Classic FM, Def Jam, iTunes, Live Nation (promoters), Music Week (magazine), Ticketmaster (promoters), XL Recordings (record label), All Around The World (record label), All The Worlds (events company)
B: 3 for AEG (concert promoters)
C: 2 for Myspace; 1 each for HMV, LTB TV, MTV, Pet Shop Boys partnership, Primary Talent International, The Sun, Virgin Media, William Morris, Official Chart Company
D: 2 for ASDA stores, 2 Fremantle (producers of X Factor, X's Got Talent, X Idol, etc); 1 each for BSkyB (Sky television), Freud communications, Guardian Media Group radio
E: Orion Security Print, BMI (music licensing agency), Black and Blonde (music management behind The Soldiers and various pop acts)
F: Heart (radio)
G: Bauer media (Heat, Kerrang, FHM, Kiss radio, and many more)
H: Dragonstorm Records, Olswang (media lawyers), ITV2 press, Just 4 Linen (linen hire service)
J: 2 for Comet Group (electrical retailer)

Many of the lesser tables were also set aside for Brits staff, Mastercard, and miscellaneous suppliers.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Brand new you're retro

The Citroën DS3 is according to Wikipedia a "luxury supermini", a small car being produced by French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën. It is being advertised with the slogan "anti retro" and a variety of advertisements promoting the idea that the car is a dramatic new innovation on a par with The Beatles or punk: the antithesis of the backward look. This assertion of novelty includes a TV ad with footage of John Lennon (who died 29 years before the car was launched) speaking of newness and modernity and destroying all that came before, and an online project in which bands such as Editors take a break from producing 1980s-influenced indie rock to nominate a selection of ground-breaking epochal tracks. Other bands participating include new wave-influence power-pop group Ash, aging stadium dance act Faithless, soundtrack favourites Zero 7, up-and-coming indie band Temper Trap, and traditionalist rockers Stereophonics.

There is nothing new in artistic movements rejecting the past: punk, Lettrism, Dada, Futurism, and many other movements did exactly this thing, whether by declaring a hatred of Pink Floyd or promising "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind" (Futurist manifesto, 1909). But just as the Sex Pistols recycled Rolling Stones riffs and a long tradition of rock 'n' roll rebellion, the DS3 takes its name from one of the most iconic cars in Citroën's history, the DS, launched in 1955 and still coming very high in polls of the most beautiful and well-designed cars of all time. The DS3 costs from GBP 11 700 in the UK, looking brutal and bottom-heavy with bulky squarish front, low sides, big air intakes, and streamlined top. According to Autocar it is intended to compete with another design classic, the BMW-owned Mini: perhaps the DS3's rejection of the past has one particular legend in mind.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Naturalism as a radical act

The previous entry explained how realism is not a central feature of fiction when the history of the novel is considered. However, the other side of this is that realism, or naturalism, when it appears in literature can actually be radical and avant-garde. By naturalism, I mean the representation of the everyday lives of ordinary people: not kings, heroes, saints, millionaires, or murderers, but people doing the quotidian tasks of growing or acquiring food and money, working, cooking, cleaning, relating to their family, colleagues, and complete strangers.

As mentioned in the previous entry, the novel began as a highly non-realist form. Early proto-novels such as Utopia (1516), Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52), and Don Quixote (1605-15) were of a fantastical or mock-heroic quality, although all three works referred to contemporary society in different ways. Later, writers like Richardson and Austen embourgeoised the novel, although their upper-middle-class heroes and heroines were far from the median income or average life expectancy of the time.

While the social problem novel became a genre of the mid-19th century (North and South, etc), such works are little read today; the next big change was the development of French naturalism. This focussed on the lives of the urban poor, describing factory workers and miners, but finding a surer market with tales of prostitutes, pimps, and other petty criminals. Thus a genre which could have been unflinching in its portrayal of the everyday instead became sensationalist. French naturalism influenced American writers like Theodore Dreiser, who focussed on tragedy and a doctrine of social Darwinism, and Alfred Doeblin, whose Berlin Alexanderplatz treated the material of the French naturalist novel (pimps, whores, and drunks) in a highly unnaturalistic fashion.

With modernism, the search for a new form to portray everyday life meant that an increasing interest in the mundane was combined with greater formal experimentation. Novels such as Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, and later BS Johnson's The Unfortunates portrayed a single day in the life of one or two characters, interspersed with flashbacks. Notwithstanding the difficulty of Ulysses, a novel covering a day brings reading time close to real time (it only takes a few hours to read Mrs Dalloway). This reduction of the novel's timespan reached perhaps its peak with Christine Brooke-Rose's Such, which covers three minutes of a man hovering between life and death, but despite its minute focus and deep interest in both science and human experience, can hardly be called naturalistic.

Beckett, a sort of follower of Joyce, sought to approach the essence of human existence from another angle: while he focused on disease, decay, and death, he stripped his novels of extraneous naturalistic detail in pursuit of a universality - his characters wandered through a timeless rural Ireland or were trapped in semi-abstract prisons. The French new novel emerged in the 1950s as one of the last threads of modernism, seeking to describe the world without recourse to plot or character. This never entirely caught on in the English-speaking world, although it influenced writers such as the already-mentioned Johnson and Brooke-Rose, and Ann Quin. Quin's Three describes a not entirely happily married middle-aged middle-class couple picking through the papers of a dead young woman while going about their own lives in a quiet country cottage, the stillness and isolation of the location reflecting the lack of action.

Outside literature, the Mass Observation movement in Britain of the 1930s sought to record and measure every detail of British life; it later fed into the growing market research industry. Through the 20th century, genre literature increasingly engaged with the underclass, particularly in crime fiction which moved from the parlours of Agatha Christie to the streets of Iceberg Slim. The rebirth of naturalism in the 1970s and 1980s had a political context: identity politics and a growing interest in the socially marginalised, combined with systems of public education that extended university study to the working class, led both sociologists and fiction writers to focus on the poor, abused, women, gay, racial minorities, etc.

In this context, I would single out James Kelman's The Busconductor Hines. This is the story of a few months in the life of a bus conductor in the Glasgow area (Kelman wrote far away from the Scottish literary centre of Edinburgh). This novel includes not only lengthy descriptions of life on the buses and the staff canteen, but also detailed accounts of the preparation of mince and many scenes of childcare. Kelman has produced other, perhaps greater works (like A Disaffection in which a sullen schoolteacher reflects on Scottish culture and the futility of his job in a more political way) but Hines is the novel that will tell you how to make mashed potatoes.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Fiction and realism

Fiction has always had a problematic relationship with the truth. The reader with only a loose conception of literature may believe the story that from the first days of the novel, fiction has been essentially realist and naturalist and neutral, only waylaid into experimentalism and reader-bamboozlement in the early 20th century by a few foreigners: an alien influence that can easily be driven out (by agencies such as the Betty Trask Prize, awarded each year to work of "a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style").

However, fiction and realism have seldom gone together. Certainly, early novels Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe pretended to be true, copying the style of actual travellers' tales. They used this pretended realism to present fantastic or exotic tales of far-off lands; while Swift commented on his own society, he never sought to accurately represent it. Other novels like the epistolary Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses took the form of genuine documents, letters between the protagonists. Yet a novel written from the shifting position of different letter writers or a deceptive journal style is not what most people consider to be realist fiction, with its transparent presentation of the facts of human life.

Prior to the birth of the novel, literature was not about creating original stories. Shakespeare worked with history and pre-existing tales; other writers used the Bible or created elaborate allegories. Nor was it in the main about life as it was lived; the popular theatre was full of conventions (men playing women, blank verse dialogue, etc), and derived from the still less naturalistic medieval allegories.

Similarly earlier novels were less about reality than literary games. Tristram Shandy played games from a different direction, a fictional life story that failed to tell anything of Shandy's life but was all about the impossibility of this telling. Right from their birth with Don Quixote, it was clear that novels were uncertain whether people would take them to be true or lies, whether they would understand and appreciate, mock, or take over the fictional world and write their own sequels.

Alongside the 19th century tradition of the important social realist novel, there is a secret less reputable lineage of horror, from Mary Shelley through Poe, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and Bram Stoker. A key thread of 19th century literature was the gothic: it influenced Hawthorne and Melville in the USA, and in Britain was crucial for Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Dickens. James Hogg used the style to offer a critique of Scottish history and religion. Even Jane Austen, that model of middle-class superego, wrote Gothic parody and pastiche.

For all the claims that Victorian England was the heyday of realist fiction (Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens' more serious novels), there are key works like Charlotte Bronte's Villette. An ironic retelling of her own youthful adventures, Villette intersperses gothic elements into a narrative that constantly refutes the reader's desire to know more about its central character and Bronte herself, playing in a metatextual fashion with the notion of literary fame and the relationship between author and character; six hundred pages of self-denial with an ambiguous ending.

Edgar Allan Poe's influence on French late romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde was immense - allegedly because he read better in French than English. A great hoaxer, he played with notions of truth; following Dafoe or Swift, he wrote a tall traveller's tale with Arthur Gordon Pym and pretended it was a real story of adventure. But his enclosed worlds of fear, paranoia, dread, and love, conjured up by wispy words and falling away again into ruin or dark tarns, set the scene for modernism from Kafka to Beckett. Much of Dostoevsky, too, is largely concerned with people going mad in small dingy rooms; Dostoevsky admired Poe and copied his fictional detective for Crime and Punishment.

After that came the period when everybody acknowledges literature lost its interest in realism. The classic early modernist novel - Conrad, Ford, Fitzgerald - was an unfinished tale told second- or third-hand by someone who failed to realise the full significance of what he was saying. Authors pursuing realism now wrote in highly non-traditional forms: Joyce, Dos Passos, Alfred Doeblin, and Virginia Woolf all in different ways rejected the normal principles of narrative to document their modern world, which seemed a place where traditional stories of human agency and conventional narrative had no place.

Perhaps the greatest work of literary history and criticism is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Yet the history of western literature is not about finding an accurate representation of reality, but of creating lies. Any truth it finds is momentary and fragmented and self-contradictory, ready to crumble into ruins at the slightest touch.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Buddy Wakefield: travelling preacher

Buddy Wakefield is one of the leading figures in slam poetry, a form of performance poetry or spoken word performance. A combination of troubadour, writer, and motivational guru, he travels the countryside bedazzling appreciative audiences his inventive symbols and uplifting message. He won the individual World Poetry Slam Championships in 2004 and 2005, and has had success in team events. Wakefield is an entrancing performer, jerkily full of energy, casually dressed with a shaven head, jumping up and down in rhythm, contorting his face, and using his arms held out down in front of him for punctuation. He has recorded for Strange Famous Records, founded by rapper and poetry slam performer Sage Francis, and for folk singer Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label.

Wakefield was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1974, and worked as an executive assistant in Gig Harbor, Washington. Then in 2001, according to legend, he sold all his possessions except for a Honda Civic and began to travel the USA performing poetry and meeting people, sleeping on couches or in his car. This mode of life goes back in myth to the Provencal minstrels of the middle ages, but more recently is associated with folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Willy Mason.

Convenience Stores (YouTube) is one of his simpler pieces, about a conversation with a woman in a store at an isolated truck stop, in which he speculates about her loneliness before she reveals her dream of escape. There's a certain quality of tourism to much of his work, as he travels the world encountering sad people, and moralises a bit. His work is also full of exhortations to live life and experience reality; coupled with frequent religious references, his work has an oddly upbeat, self-help, chicken-soup quality that is suited to the emotional atmosphere of a live show but resembles an evangelical church.

His didacticism is shown in another tale of the road, Information Man (YouTube), which describes an encounter between the narrator and someone staffing an information booth at a rest area. There are some customarily great Wakefield images: "I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day somebody will pick me to make things better". But soon it becomes clear this is a poem with a message:
If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose
this poem is too soon for you
return to your mediocrity
plug it into an amplifier
and rethink yourself
some of us are on fire for the answer
It continues to explain:
I talk a whole bunch but I really only know a few things...
I know our shoes were stitched from songs about highways
The best songs are the ones about Georgia even though I've never been there
Cause it's the only place that still believes in Jesus
I know whatever it is you believe in you've got to spare yourself the futility of making fun of God
Because that guy hasn't even talked in like - ever.
...
You are the centre of the universe
If you weren't you wouldn't be here.
Jean Heath (YouTube) is about a funeral, in the genre of moralising tale that condemns the shallowness and insincerity of those who encounter suffering or death (Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich rules this tradition). It gets the audience onside by letting them share in the condemnation of people who - shockingly - eat and talk about themselves at funerals.

Flockprinter (YouTube; text) is about flock wallpaper and God, and shows his ability to wrest a metaphor out of the most ordinary sight:
Flockprinting is an aggressive electrostatic action
using severe heat to force finely chopped fibers
onto patterns of fabric
ultimately resulting in
soft touch.
There is a tension between observation and moralising, because the one requires an openness and the other a firm point of view. Similarly, there is a paradox in travelling the world to learn about it, because all your encounters will be in a certain sense trivial, at convenience stores and rest areas, and much of life will remain behind closed doors. But his imagery is inventive, his messages underlaid with wit, and to watch him perform is astonishing.