The nodes are related more via free-association than via narrative or structural considerations. … a personal perspective emerges out of this free-association
Memory restructures and personalizes through elaborations
Miller’s 7+ – 2
It started with a research collected on the web and assembled as a website:
A patient of mine participated in website at first unbeknownst to me.
First layer: my website material
Second layer: Laura’s comments
Third layer: my notes for this book
elaborated.org
A thing as an example of itself
I writing to concretize my observations as a means of validating myself
Double nihilism
Start with a narrative introduction of the central theme . As an explicit narrative it can be used as a guide or walkthrough map of the overall forest … Jonah and thus Laura?
A case study of a case study
… so let’s proceed to the pieces themselves
Jimmy’s story about Garrick
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
you are in a maze of twisty little corridors (that all look alike)
change a couple of words in many quotes making them elaborated/personalized misquotes
The comedic genius who rocked wrestling
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/07/us/kaufman-lawler-wrestling-match/index.html
A Pale Fire written in DOM
If Kinbote used the DOM
Navigation :
Up and down the DOM
Back and forth across leaves within a node
Increased Personalization going right across leaves
“Table of Contents” sorted by last known location
Index or Glossary
Garden of Forking Paths provides the basic structure of elaborations, while Pale Fire provides the themes.
“The Garden of Forking Paths ” in Topic
All dead white men
Hitler reacts to the Hitler parodies being removed from YouTubehttp://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/22/hitlers-pissed-off-a.html
future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” — this quote is often attributed to Gibson, though no one seems to be able to pin down when or if he actually said it.
calibre (2012-01-15T13:06:15.157000+00:00). New York Times (Kindle Locations 8364-8365). calibre. Kindle Edition.
70
Melville, Billy Budd
“As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art–underprocessed, underproduced–splinters and explodes.
William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys,” Wired
Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.
74
William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys,” Wired
“The opposite of broadcast: the distribution economics of the internet favor infinite niches, not one-size-fits-all. The web’s peer-to-peer architecture: a symmetrical traffic load, with as many senders as receivers and data transmissions spread out over geography and time.
The new model is based on the intangible assets of digital bits: copies are no longer cheap but free and flow freely everywhere. As computers retrieve images from the web or displays from a server, they make temporary, internal copies of those works. Every action you invoke on your computer requires a copy of something to be made.
Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.
75
Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book,” New York Times
“Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo-and para-sciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there’s a natural duty to make what is known searchable.
No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we’ve devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They’re rewarded for the degree to which their work is cited, shared, linked, and connected in their publications, which they don’t own.
Copies don’t count anymore; copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.
76
Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book,” New York Times
In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail. On this screen, now visible to a billion people, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge.
77
Robert Greenwald, “Brave New Medium,” Nation
“We all need to begin figuring out how to tell a story for the cell phone. One thing I know: it’s not the same as telling a story for a full-length DVD.
79
John D’Agata, The Next American Essay
“Facts quicken, multiply, change shape, elude us, and bombard our lives with increasingly suspicious promises. The hybrid, shape-shifting, ambiguous nature of lyric essays makes a flowchart of our experiences of the world. No longer able to depend on canonical literature, we journey increasingly across boundaries, along borders, into fringes, and finally through our yearnings to quest, where only more questions are found; through our primal senses, where we record every wonder; through our own burning hearts, where we know better.
421
Wallace, interviewed by Laura Miller, Salon
“I don’t know what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.
422
Michel Leiris, Manhood
“I bear in my hands the disguise by which I conceal my life. A web of meaningless events, I dye it with the magic of my point of view.
423
Nietzsche
“No artist tolerates reality.
426
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
“How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?
427
Joan Didion
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.
430
Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
“The essayist gives you his thoughts and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them.
John Gardner, On Moral Fiction
“Someone once said to me, quoting someone or other, “Discursive thought is not fiction’s most efficient tool; the interaction of characters is everything.” This is when I knew I wasn’t a fiction writer, because discursive thought is what I read and write for.
442
David Shields
Freud (declining drugs to alleviate pain caused by cancer of the jaw): “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly.”
448
Borges, Ficciones
“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist and then offer a résumé, a commentary.
452
Emerson
“He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
454
Heidegger
“We don’t come to thoughts; they come to us.
480
Montaigne
“Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me.
482
Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Carson, Night by Night,” New York Times
“Johnny Carson, asked to describe the difference between himself and Robert Redford, said, “I’m playing me.”
486
David Shields
I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host.
490
David Shields
Andy Kaufman went way beyond blurring the distinction between performer and persona, past the point where you wondered what separated the actor from the character; you wondered if he himself knew anymore where the boundaries were drawn. What did he get out of such performances? The joy of not telling the audience how to react, giving that decision–or maybe just the illusion of such decision making–back to the audience. Afterward, he typically stayed in character when among fellow performers, who resented being treated like civilians.
492
A crush? Sort of; more Paul Bravmann’s.
“The source of my crush on Sarah Silverman? Her willingness to say unsettling things about herself, position herself as a fuck-me/fuck-you figure, a bad-good girl, a JAP who takes her JAPiness and pushes it until it becomes the culture’s grotesquerie: “I was raped by a doctor–which is, you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” “I don’t care if you think I’m racist; I only care if you think I’m thin.” “Obviously, I’m not trying to belittle the events of September eleventh; they were devastating, they were beyond devastating, and I don’t want to say especially for these people or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, 900 calories.”
459
Borges
“I wrote a story once about a man who began a very large picture, and therein was a kind of map—for example, hills, horses, streams, fishes, and woods and towers and men and all sorts of things. When the day of his death came, he found he had been making a picture of himself. That is the case with most writers.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. – Kurt Vonnegut
THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT SIMPLIFIED. If you’re smart, you’re smart enough to think you’re stupid, and if you’re stupid, you’re stupid…
The essay, finally published in 2010 and threaded into D’Agata’s book “About a Mountain,” tells the story of a boy named Levi Presley who in 2002 jumped to his death from the observation deck of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas. D’Agata used that episode to meditate on ideas about, among other things, suicide and Las Vegas, the stories Vegas tells about itself, the stories visitors tell themselves about Vegas, and what a city built on artifice might tell us about the human condition.
“You don’t want to come in contact with reality when you’re here for a fantasy,” D’Agata quotes a Nevada state senator as saying. “Lifespan” flips that platitude on its head and asks: Do we want to come in contact with fantasy when we’re here for reality?
From D’Agata’s first sentence, which says that at the time of Levi’s death there were “34 licensed strip clubs in Vegas,” Fingal detects trouble. D’Agata has supplied The Believer with a source suggesting the city had just 31 such clubs. Fingal asks D’Agata how he arrived at “34.” D’Agata replies in dubious fashion: “Because the rhythm of ‘34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘31.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/magazine/the-fact-checker-versus-the-fabulist.html?_r=1&ref=review
Case Study
Case Histories and Fiction
Pirandello sat in his writing room into which characters came to him to share their narratives
King Henry wrote narratives for everyone he came in contact with
George Kelly
wrote characters for his patients.
action takes place in the dialogue between therapist and patient…. subjectivism,
Socratic Dialogue
Object Relations
Winnicott and the Squiggle Game
Online Games
Analytic Attitude
Object Relations as a dialogue between entities … entities joining up to form an identity
Endgame : the externalized dramatization of psychic object relations
Gibson?:Cyberspace is the space which you enter on the telephone. Now social apps.
Narrative vs Truth
Vahinger
Spence
In the Poetics , Aristotle claims that plot is the most important feature of a narrative. A good story has a beginning, middle, and end, making a shapely whole with no extraneous elements. Aristotle also addressed the social and psychological role of narration. He described tragic drama as the purging or catharsis of the undesirable emotions of pity and fear by first arousing them and then clearing them away.
A large contemporary literature has explored diverse theories of narrative, including Russian formalist theories (Propp, Sklovskij, Eichenbaum);
Bakhtinian, or dialogical theories (Mikhail Bakhtin);
New Critical theories (R.P. Blackmur); Chicago school, or neo-Aristotelian , theories (R.S. Crane, Wayne Booth); psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Schafer, Spence, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham); hermeneutic and phenomenological theories (R. Ingarden, P. Ricoeur, Georges Poulet); structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories (C. Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gérard Genette, Hayden White); Marxist and sociological theories (Georg Lukacs, Frederic Jameson); reader-response theories (Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss); and poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man) .
Some general features of this literature include the idea that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives, a position most extremely stated by the Structuralists, and that there is a complex interaction between the telling of stories and what is told in them, especially their performative dimension.
According to J. Hillis Miller, we need narratives in order to give sense to our world, and the shape of that sense is a fundamental carrier of the sense. We need the “same” stories over and over, as a powerful way to assert the basic ideology of our culture. Miller also suggests that in some way these stories do not satisfy. In this respect, he comes close to Paul de Man’s description of texts. According to de Man, “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadibility of the prior narration.” (Allegories of Reading, p.205)
The extensions of narrative inquiry as ways of describing both history writing and psychoanalysis have called into question the precise nature of their respective claims to truth .
While Freud never explicity discussed the narrative character of the analytic experience, later writers such as Sherwood and Spence have pointed to its central importance and have shown the ways in which the psychoanalytic dialogue seeks to uncover the analysand’s efforts to maintain a certain kind of narrative discontinuity. To remember, then is precisely not to recall events as isolated; it is to become capable of forming meaningful narrative sequences. (Connerton)
In Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, Donald Spence suggests that psychoanalytic narratives should be thought of more as construction than as reconstruction, that psychoanalysts give up the archaological model and think of interpretation as a pragmatic statement with no necessary referent in the past — in short that narrative truth replace historical truth. The test of this truth is a therapeutic one, and Spence notes that Freud came to take the position that “an assured conviction of the truth of the construction … achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory . Spence compares this construction to an artistic and rhetorical product.
This pragmatic approach to the truth has exposed a vulnerability in the Freudian structure that critics have been quick to exploit, especially in relation to Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory. (see unconscious ) The extravagant claims of recovered memories of child abuse and of consequent multiple personality disorder are but the counterpart of this attack on Freud.
George Kelly scripted characters for his patients to portray… Construct altenativeism
Solomon : emotions as occurring in the space between people
Schafer and the Intersubjectivists
Objects in therapy and programs
Goes from a Case History through to a failed double nihilistic psychotherapeutic process
The other chapters are generated by the development of the therapeutic process as articled from the metaphor of a study of Elaboration
The failure of termination as “only thing you should get from the patient is money”
Case History Laura written as a join project of patient and therapist — by the third mind
use of the double nihilism
a fictionalized elaboration of several different therapies.
Laurie Anderson
as the instantiation of the inter subject creative force governing the therapeutic process
Patient forging and strengthening identity, therapist summing it up
We begin to realize that you can’t get to her through her “Dream Book” because she does not unmask her personal dynamics. This is something that this case history hopes to work through.
Like Laurie Laura hides behind her creativity
Written by both therapist and patient
Identity Issues
Social Anxiety
Alienated from parents (by death?)
The book the therpy’s baby
the media that contains her creation
but failure at termination (Katy)
Becomes successful and leaves abruptly on her own. Brendan training wheels
Failed termination —
Laura mid 20s
Turtle vest
Life as Fiction: http://home.mira.net/%7Ekmurray/psych/lifeasf.htm
Image via Wikipedia
I’ve been using the two terms ‘Story’ and ‘Narrative’ very frequently on this blog. As I look back, I realize that I may not have done a very good job defining them, or more importantly, the difference between the two.
The goal here is to explain these concepts and how they relate to each other to someone completely unfamiliar with literary theory.
Story
A ‘story’ is, in simplest terms, a sequence of events. So when thinking of a story it is A then B then C then D, the set of relevant events in chronological order.
Let’s go spelling bee and use these two terms in somewhat defining sentences.
The story of Bob’s Monday begins when he wakes up in the morning. He brushes his teeth, gets dressed, gets in his car, drives to work, parks, sits at his desk, goes to lunch, flirts with his coworkers, goes back to his desk, does more work, drives home, eats dinner and then he goes to sleep at night.
Story is the entire sequence of events (though even that paragraph simplifies some).
Plot
Plot describes a set of events as they relate to each other. The term is concerned with how to sequence and select the events of a story as a structure for its telling and how that telling can find maximum effect.
The plot usually concerns itself with specific points of the story and the pattern of their relation. If we go with Freytag on this , plot breaks down a story into events dealing with exposition, the rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
The plot of Bob’s Monday begins when he wakes up in the morning. The most interesting part of the day is at lunch, when he flirts with his coworkers. The plot ends when he goes to sleep at night.
Narrative
The concept of narrative deals more with how the events are told. Narrative is the ordering of events into a consumable format.
If you don’t mind using the previous words in this one’s definition, narrative is the method and means by which you construct the events of a story into a plot. It concerns itself with the sequence of the events, the medium on which they are told and the way these events are put together into one coherent unit.
Narratives may involve a reordering of the events of a story. The story’s events can be set out of chronological order; be combined with elements from outside of the story to better tell the consumer what is going on; or to build dramatic effect. Sometimes a narrative may draw attention to things or events the story lacks, because the contrast is interesting.
The narrative comes from the events of the story in order to create a dramatic effect through the structure of the plot.
The narrative of Bob’s Monday: Bob wakes up in the morning, skipping breakfast so he can go straight to work. Though most of Bob’s day is boring, he enjoys lunch, when he frequently flirts with his coworkers. After work he goes straight home to get enough sleep to go to work the next day.
If you’ve been confused by how I use these different terms, hopefully this helps you better understand them. If not, please tell me down in the comments and I can elaborate further.
Laura
Laura Jay
she envies him instead of loving him
fear of dissolving into the relationship
the consolidation of adult identity
Identity Issues
I had written a psychological testing report for Laura when she was 12?
One of her parents called me later for therapy when 24… she had several psychiatric hospitalizations since then
Laura cannot readily see things from another person’s point of view while still holding onto her own perspective Because she has difficulty manipulate, or shift between, two perspectives, she experiences her identity as threatened when she … consider someone else’s point of view. This is seen in her tendency to monopolize a conversation rather than engage in the give-and-take of talking with another person.
Nevertheless, Laura very much wants to have friends. So she attempts to reach out, and then doesn’t understand why her efforts to connect are so unsuccessful. To make matters worse, the frustration and need for validation and affirmation from others that she feels compounds her already significant social anxiety.
Consequently, to protect herself, Laura hasn’t quite withdrawn from others but she is constricted — she hides and insulates herself. She has set up her own world, and when she does not appear anxious, it’s because she’s “in hiding” and not really dealing with people. Socially, other kids pick up on this and, as a result, Eva is frequently bullied and teased for being different.
Her social “strategy” has resulted in isolation and being alone.
Laura has a whole arsenal of defenses to protect her from her social anxiety. These defenses provide a much-needed sense of ego identity. Rather than feeling fragile and endangered with the loss of self, she can feel the opposite: strong, impenetrable, and capable of fighting back against “intruders” and “enemies” with an ego-enhancing sense of self-sufficiency.
Laura ’s prized vest is an apt metaphor for self-protection and self-sufficiency, as well as hiding and constriction. This is precisely why her parents refer to it as “ Laura ’s turtle shell.” It contains a plethora of devices that, metaphorically, can help ward off anxiety attack and assist Laura in finding herself if she begins to feel herself disappearing. Its many pockets are filled with the symbolic tools required to survive an attack, lest someone begin to penetrate her boundaries with their stronger identity.
Laura is also attempting to build an identity by feeling self-sufficient. She is saying, “I don’t need anybody.” On the other hand, she very much wants to be a part of social situations and have friends.
Her vest protects Laura from being “touched.” It is akin to living inside a shell. Within it, she can hide and feel strong, like a well-prepared soldier. It is a vivid symbol of self-protection and of Eva’s need to bring along a defensive arsenal wherever she goes, to protect her from the sense of constant, imminent danger to her fragile identity.
her need to keep herself together, when she becomes confused and anxious about losing parts of herself. Its compartments are stable and secure. Within it, her supplies are safe and there is a sense of Laura cannot surrender her own point of view … organization, place and belonging.
talking serves to block out the other person and diffuses the pressure of having to shift perspective. It serves Laura ’s need to share and express herself without losing her identity. In many respects, monologuing resembles parallel play, in which two young children are physically together and sharing space, but not interacting.
Verbally, Laura is talking TO, not WITH, someone else.
Another affect is Laura ’s tendency to rock back and forth, which is a way of locating herself physically and feeling centered. As long as she can rock, she has a sense of who she is. The world is revolving and moving around Eva, but she is the center of her own universe.
Oppositional behavior is also a defense against feeling the imminent loss of self, allowing Laura to feel more secure and solid. One of her main weapons in her personal war to remain a cohesive whole is to resist and rebel against therapy.
Laura opposes therapy because it represents a social situation. It creates the very conditions that give rise to her extreme need to protect herself from identity loss. Her overly sensitive antenna pick up a pressure to interact with the therapist so that the latter can “help.” From Laura ’s perspective, however, to receive help, or even engage in dialogue with the therapist, is to potentially confront the very thing she fears the most — the dissolution of her fragile identity.
As a result, any effort on the therapist’s part to communicate, understand and share is counter-productive. To be “helpful” is to be intrusive, stifling. The moment Laura picks up any threat to the integrity of her identity, she gets anxious and goes into defensive mode, donning her “armor.” This might be an oppositional stance, where she fights back by resisting the source of the pressure to interact — in this case, the therapist. A battle of the wills ensues.
In another example of oppositional behavior during testing, when presented with emotionally evocative material, Eva ignored the examiner’s instructions and — almost literally — began marching to her own drummer. As noted in response to the TAT, rather than follow the directions given to her, Laura made music, tapping the cards in a rhythmic way and waving them around to protect herself from the anxiety they might arouse.
Laura feels safest in her own world, marching to her own drummer. At the same time, she is extremely interested in other people and wants to make friends and engage in social activities. Her paradox is that even as she tries to fit in with her peers, she is protecting her weak ego by distancing herself.
Laura is a child endowed with numerous significant resources. Sensitive and beautiful, she possesses extraordinary intelligence and displays talent in drama and art. Laura ’s test results show that she is functioning at the Very Superior level. Her cognitive strengths include an exceptional vocabulary and ability to conceptualize abstractly, but verbally and perceptually. Combined with her high level of motivation and organization, she is an excellent student. She has the capacity to intensely focus and engage in numerous subjects that interest her, resulting in a wealth of information already acquired and the expectation of gaining much more.
In contrast to these tremendous strengths, Laura has struggled with social difficulties and a high level of anxiety. Both Laura ’s parents and her therapist questioned whether there was a neurological factor at the core of Laura ’s social and emotional difficulties. This evaluation has uncovered that Eva has a neurologically based weakness in “shifting sets” – i.e., she cannot easily manipulate objects, including people, and percepts (images) in her mind to account simultaneously for both her own and a different point of view. Because of this inefficiency in switching points of view, Eva lacks the flexibility to surrender her own perspective to see that of another person.
Laura ’s difficulty in shifting perspectives negatively affects her processing speed, slowing down the rate at which she assimilates some material. Laura needs more time than others of her intellectual level to carry out tasks that require switching from one domain to another, such as recognizing an object and then stating the correct name for it. Due to her enormous cognitive resources, Laura is able to compensate for this weakness academically. However, socially, she has been unable to cope with the challenge of “relating” to others in the back-and-forth manner that is customary in interpersonal interaction.
Thus, the areas most prominently and notably affected by her difficulty in shifting points of view are social and emotional. Because she cannot let go of her own perspective to appreciate what someone else may be seeing or feeling, social interaction does not go smoothly. Moreover, Laura is threatened by extreme social anxiety when she feels on the verge of surrendering her own identity in order to account for someone else’s. Emotionally, she is preoccupied with the conflict of how to protect from losing her identity and, at the same time, have friendships with other children, which she very much desire.
Laura protects herself from social anxiety with an arsenal of defenses. These include her “turtle shell” vest, an apt metaphor for self-protection and self-sufficiency. Another major defense for Laura is her oppositional behavior in therapy. Being oppositional acts to shore up her weak sense of self. Thus, offering her help does not help. Instead, it results in a therapeutic misalliance, which produces significant frustration for all involved.
It should be noted that despite her significant social stressors, Laura overcame earlier problems in school, notably with speech, and is no longer in need of special education services. She has moved on to achieve considerable academic success, including consistently high grades and good behavior. Her accomplishments speak to Laura ’s superior intelligence and strong inner resources.
Moving forward, the goal is to marshal those considerable resources in a constructive way to help in overcoming her present social and emotional difficulties.
Above all, the focal point of Laura ’s therapy should be one central concept, the threat of identity loss, and helping her maintain her sense of identity in social situations.
Certainly Laura can be dynamic and expressive. However, like the sensitive artist she is, Laura needs her own space. She reacts against intrusions, even if meant to be helpful, because they are perceived as threats to her very integrity.
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223
224
230
232
233
234
240
242
243
244
Therapist
The Author’s Preface
All characterizations? have been substantially elaborated in order to protect identity — including myself.
Strive for Nabokov’s humor
What I intend to do and how it grows out of theoretical considerations given in Case Study section
Why mid 20s: I work best…
a verbal insightful dialogue with a give and take… the development of an adult identity…
I do my writing between patients (often between evening and morning patients)
My own failure as a patient/student/follower
Mysore finish my practice before teacher scheduled to start… follow my breath
Battling it out in institutions … finally able to focus on my work in my room
Pirandello’s characters coming to him in his study … (I remember this but can’t get precise quote… maybe later)
Only think you should get is money
I like creating within the transferential arena…
The therapist as a performance artist (Laurie Anderson) with an audience of one
Book not limited by either covers or time
originally titled “Fictionalization of Psychoanalysis” but generally feeling works neither as fiction or nonfiction
Solomon as emotions happening in space between people
a product of the therapy…
always
Jimmy’s story about Garrick
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
from
did I live on tenth Street or Thompson at the time?
320
322
323
324
330
332
333
334
340
342
343
344
Process
Coded Nodes
Process as and introduction and overview of the rest of the study
An adventure
each chapter a node
the code prevents it from turning into a labyrinth or maze. Similar to how Nabakov used fictional narrative in Pale Fire
the process of assembling my notes had become an interpersonal dialogue
The case where the therapeutic alliance breaks down in the termination phase —
taking the training wheels off
Plato as failing in the termination stage with his teacher Socrates
420
422
423
424
430
432
433
434
440
442
443
444
Structures
Music of the Spheres
History
|
my use of tape loops as a teenager “… and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number … “ It seemed clear to the Pythagoreans that the distances between the planets would have the same ratios as produced harmonious sounds in a plucked string. To them, the solar system consisted of ten spheres revolving in circles about a central fire, each sphere giving off a sound the way a projectile makes a sound as it swished through the air; the closer spheres gave lower tones while the farther moved faster and gave higher pitched sounds. All combined into a beautiful harmony, the music of the spheres. This idea was picked up by Plato, who in his Republic says of the cosmos; “. . . Upon each of its circles stood a siren who was carried round with its movements, uttering the concords of a single scale,” and who, in his Timaeus , describes the circles of heaven subdivided according to the musical ratios. Kepler, 20 centuries later, wrote in his Harmonice Munde (1619) says that he wishes “to erect the magnificent edifice of the harmonic system of the musical scale . . . as God, the Creator Himself, has expressed it in harmonizing the heavenly motions.” And later, “I grant you that no sounds are given forth, but I affirm . . . that the movements of the planets are modulated according to harmonic proportions.” Ospensky The idea that the same ratios that are pleasing to the ear would also be pleasing to the eye appears in the writings of Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, and St. Aquinas. But the most direct statement comes from the renaissance architect Leone Battista Alberti (1404-1472), “[I am] convinced of the truth of Pythagoras’ saying, that Nature is sure to act consistently . . . I conclude that the same numbers by means of which the agreement of sounds affect our ears with delight are the very same which please our eyes and our minds.” |
Loop
In electroacoustic music , a loop is a repeating section of sound material. Short sections of material can be repeated to create ostinato patterns. A loop can be created using a wide range of music technologies including digital samplers , synthesisers , sequencers , drum machines , tape machines , delay units , or they can be programmed using computer music software .
Definitions
“Loops are short sections of tracks (probably between one and four bars in length), which you believe might work being repeated.” A loop is not “any sample, but…specifically a small section of sound that’s repeated continuously.” Contrast with a one-shot sample. (Duffell 2005, p.14)
“A loop is a sample of a performance that has been edited to repeat seamlessly when the audio file is played end to end.” (Hawkins 2004, p. 10)
[edit ]
Origins
See also: Musique concrete and Sampling (music)
While repetition is used in the musics of all cultures, the first musicians to use loops were electroacoustic music pioneers such as Pierre Schaeffer , Halim El-Dabh , [1] Pierre Henry , Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen . Stockhausen’s music in turn influenced
The Beatles to experiment with tape loops, and their use of loops in early psychedelic works (most notably 1966’s “Tomorrow Never Knows ” and 1968’s avant-garde “Revolution 9 “) brought the technique into the mainstream. The stereo version of The Kinks ‘ 1967 song “Autumn Almanac ” also features a psychedelic tape loop during the fadeout .
Later, inspired by Terry Riley ‘s use of one tape on two tape machines, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp created the technical basis for their No Pussyfooting album—this technological concept was later dubbed Frippertronics .
Another approach was the use of pre-recorded loops, exemplified by Yellow Magic Orchestra , [2] who released one of the first albums to feature mostly samples and loops (1981’s Technodelic ), [3] and Grandmaster Flash ‘s turntablism . Major producers like Timbaland , and underground producers like Jimmy Spice Curry , as well as the group Sir Mask, and others often create their own sound loops then incorporate them into songs.
Use of pre-recorded loops made its way into many styles of popular music, including hip hop , trip hop , techno , drum and bass , and contemporary dub , as well as into mood music on soundtracks.
Today many musicians use digital hardware and software devices to create and modify loops, often in conjunction with various electronic musical effects.
Computer programs to create music using loops range in features, user friendliness, and price. (See #Loop-based music software for details )
Many hardware loopers exist in rack unit , effect pedal , or other forms. Early examples of rack and pedal loopers are the Gibson Echoplex [4] , DigiTech JamMan [5] and the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Delay. [6]
The musical loop is one of the most important features of video game music . It is also the guiding principle behind devices like the several Chinese Buddhist music boxes that loop chanting of mantras, which in turn was the inspiration of the Buddha machine , an ambient-music generating device. The Jan Linton album “ Buddha Machine Music” used these loops along with others created by manually scrolling through CDs on a CDJ player. [7]
A major advantage of looping that it can be used continually, and not have the quality degradation that is inherent when musician playing a musical part repeatedly (human error). Additionally there can be huge cost savings, on the production end.
Loop-based music software
See also: Music sequencer and Digital audio workstation
Music software to create music using loops range in features, user friendliness, and price. Some of the most widely used are, Digidesign ‘s Pro Tools , Sony ‘s ACID and Sound Forge , Cakewalk Sonar , ReCycle , GarageBand , FL Studio (formerly Fruity Loops ), Propellerhead’s Reason and Ableton Live .
External links
▪ Music loops at the Open Directory Project
▪ A community featuring music remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses
▪ An article in the Boston Globe about looping
Add Rapaport re early pre-hypertext and Pale Fire meta comments “… and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number … ” It seemed clear to the Pythagoreans that the distances between the planets would have the same ratios as produced harmonious sounds in a plucked string. To them, the solar system consisted of ten spheres revolving in circles about a central fire, each sphere giving off a sound the way a projectile makes a sound as it swished through the air; the closer spheres gave lower tones while the farther moved faster and gave higher pitched sounds. All combined into a beautiful harmony, the music of the spheres. Because of the secretive nature of his school and the custom of its students to attribute everything to their teacher, there is no evidence that Pythagoras himself worked on or proved this theorem. Some attribute it as a carefully constructed myth by followers of Plato over two centuries after the death of Pythagoras, mainly to bolster the case for Platonic meta-physics, which resonate well with the ideas they attributed to Pythagoras. Another belief attributed to Pythagoras was that of the “harmony of the spheres”. Thus the planets and stars moved according to mathematical equations, which corresponded to musical notes and thus produced a symphony. Pythagoras asserted he could write on the moon. His plan of operation was to write on a looking-glass in blood, and place it opposite the moon, when the inscription would appear photographed or reflected on the moon’s disc. It was an old Pythagorean maxim, that every thing was not to be told to every body Thus the Pythagoreans were divided into an inner circle called the mathematikoi (“learners”) and an outer circle called the akousmatikoi (“listeners”). Iamblichus describes them in terms of esoterikoi and exoterikoi (or alternatively Pythagoreioi and Pythagoristai), according to the degree of intimacy which they enjoyed with Pythagoras. Porphyry wrote “the mathematikoi learned the more detailed and exactly elaborated version of this knowledge, the akousmatikoi (were) those who had heard only the summary headings of his Pythagoras, or in a broader sense, the Pythagoreans, allegedly exercised an important influence on the work of Plato. According to R. M. Hare, this influence consists of three points: The platonic Republic might be related to the idea of “a tightly organized community of like-minded thinkers”, like the one established by Pythagoras in Croton. There is evidence that Plato possibly took from Pythagoras the idea that mathematics and, generally speaking, abstract thinking is a secure basis for philosophical thinking as well as “for substantial theses in science and morals”. Plato and Pythagoras shared a “mystical approach to the soul and its place in the material world”. It is probable that both were influenced by Orphism. Aristotle claimed that the philosophy of Plato closely followed the teachings of the Pythagoreans, and Cicero repeats this claim: Platonem ferunt didicisse Pythagorea omnia (“They say Plato learned all things Pythagorean”). Bertrand Russell, in his A History of Western Philosophy, contended that the influence of Pythagoras on Plato and others was so great that he should be considered the most influential of all Western philosophers. Pythagoras started a secret society called the Pythagorean brotherhood devoted to the study of mathematics. This had a great effect on future esoteric traditions, such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, both of which were occult groups dedicated to the study of mathematics and both of which claimed to have evolved out of the Pythagorean brotherhood. Music of the Spheres This idea was picked up by Plato, who in his Republic says of the cosmos; “. . . Upon each of its circles stood a siren who was carried round with its movements, uttering the concords of a single scale,” and who, in his Timaeus , describes the circles of heaven subdivided according to the musical ratios. Kepler, 20 centuries later, in his Harmonice Munde (1619,) says that he wishes “to erect the magnificent edifice of the harmonic system of the musical scale . . . as God, the Creator Himself, has expressed it in harmonizing the heavenly motions.” And later, “I grant you that no sounds are given forth, but I affirm . . . that the movements of the planets are modulated according to harmonic proportions.” Ospensky The idea that the same ratios that are pleasing to the ear would also be pleasing to the eye appears in the writings of Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, and St. Aquinas. But the most direct statement comes from the renaissance architect Leone Battista Alberti (1404-1472), “[I am] convinced of the truth of Pythagoras’ saying, that Nature is sure to act consistently . . . I conclude that the same numbers by means of which the agreement of sounds affect our ears with delight are the very same which please our eyes and our minds.” n electroacoustic music, a loop is a repeating section of sound material. Short sections of material can be repeated to create ostinato patterns. A loop can be created using a wide range of music technologies including digital samplers, synthesisers, sequencers, drum machines, tape machines, delay units, or they can be programmed using computer music software. “A loop is a sample of a performance that has been edited to repeat seamlessly when the audio file is played end to end.” (Hawkins 2004, p. 10) While repetition is used in the musics of all cultures, the first musicians to use loops were electroacoustic music pioneers such as Pierre Schaeffer, Halim El-Dabh, Pierre Henry, Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. … inspired by Terry Riley’s use of one tape on two tape machines, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp created the technical basis for their No Pussyfooting album—this technological concept was later dubbed Frippertronics. Another approach was the use of pre-recorded loops, exemplified by Yellow Magic Orchestra, who released one of the first albums to feature mostly samples and loops (1981’s Technodelic), and Grandmaster Flash’s turntablism. Major producers like Timbaland, and underground producers like Jimmy Spice Curry, as well as the group Sir Mask, and others often create their own sound loops then incorporate them into songs. In the early 1990s dedicated digital devices were invented specifically for use in live looping i.e. loops that are recorded in front of a live audience. Live looping is not exclusive to electronic music and is found in the singer/songwriter genre, achieving new popularity in the employ of popular artists such as Imogen Heap, Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, Marbin, and KT Tunstall. The musical loop is one of the most important features of video game music. It is also the guiding principle behind devices like the several Chinese Buddhist music boxes that loop chanting of mantras, which in turn was the inspiration of the Buddha machine, an ambient-music generating device. The Jan Linton album “Buddha Machine Music” used these loops along with others created by manually scrolling through CDs on a CDJ player. A major advantage of looping that it can be used continually, and not have the quality degradation that is inherent when musician playing a musical part repeatedly (human error). Additionally there can be huge cost savings, on the production end.
Nabokov
Borges
Reich
Stephen Michael Reich (/ ˈraɪʃ / ; [1] born October 3, 1936) is an American composer who, along with La Monte Young , Terry Riley , and Philip Glass , pioneered minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. [2][3][4]
His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (for example, his early compositions It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out ), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, Pendulum Music and Four Organs ). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music , especially in the US. Reich’s work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably the Grammy Award -winning Different Trains .
Reich’s style of composition influenced many composers and musical groups. Reich has been described as one of “a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history”, [5] and the critic Kyle Gann has said Reich “may…be considered, by general acclamation, America’s greatest living composer.” [6]
On January 25, 2007, Reich was named the 2007 recipient of the Polar Music Prize , together with jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins . On April 20, 2009, Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music recognizing Double Sextet , first performed in Richmond March 26, 2008. The citation called it “a major work that displays an ability to channel an initial burst of energy into a large-scale musical event, built with masterful control and consistently intriguing to the ear.” [7]
Contents [ hide ]
1 Career
1.1 Early life
1.2 1960s
1.3 1970s
1.4 1980s
1.5 1990s to present
2 Influence
3 Recent projects
4 Quotations
5 Works
5.1 Music
5.2 Selected discography
5.3 Books
6 Further reading
7 See also
8 Notes
9 References
10 External links
Career [edit ]
Early life [edit ]
Reich was born in New York City to the Broadway lyricist June Sillman . When he was one year old, his parents divorced, and Reich divided his time between New York and California. He was given piano lessons as a child and describes growing up with the “middle-class favorites”, having no exposure to music written before 1750 or after 1900. At the age of 14 he began to study music in earnest, after hearing music from the Baroque period and earlier, as well as music of the 20th century. Reich studied drums with Roland Kohloff in order to play jazz . While attending Cornell University , he minored in music and graduated in 1957 with a B.A. in Philosophy. [ citation needed ] Reich’s B.A. thesis was on Ludwig Wittgenstein ; later he would set texts by that philosopher to music in Proverb (1995) and You Are (variations) (2006).
For a year following graduation, Reich studied composition privately with Hall Overton before he enrolled at Juilliard to work with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958–1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland, California , where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961–1963) and earned a master’s degree in composition. At Mills, Reich composed Melodica for melodica and tape , which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release Music from Mills . [8]
Reich worked with the San Francisco Tape Music Center along with Pauline Oliveros , Ramon Sender , Morton Subotnick , and Terry Riley . [9] He was involved with the premiere of Riley’s In C and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse, which is now standard in performance of the piece.
1960s [edit ]
Reich’s early forays into composition involved experimentation with twelve-tone composition , but he found the rhythmic aspects of the twelve-tone series more interesting than the melodic aspects. [10] Reich also composed film soundtracks for Plastic Haircut , Oh Dem Watermelons , and Thick Pucker , three films by Robert Nelson . The soundtrack of Plastic Haircut , composed in 1963, was a short tape collage, possibly Reich’s first. The Watermelons soundtrack used two old Stephen Foster minstrel tunes as its basis, and used repeated phrasing together in a large five-part canon . The music for Thick Pucker arose from street recordings Reich made walking around San Francisco with Nelson, who filmed in black and white 16mm. This film no longer survives. A fourth film from 1965, about 25 minutes long and tentatively entitled “Thick Pucker II”, was assembled by Nelson from outtakes of that shoot and more of the raw audio Reich had recorded. Nelson was not happy with the resulting film and never showed it.
Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley , whose work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It’s Gonna Rain . Composed in 1965, the piece used a fragment of a sermon about the end of the world given by a black Pentecostal street-preacher known as Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the last three words of the fragment, “it’s gonna rain!”, to multiple tape loops which gradually move out of phase with one another.
The 13-minute Come Out (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by Daniel Hamm, one of the falsely accused Harlem Six , who was severely injured by police. [11] The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase “to let the bruise’s blood come out to show them.” Reich rerecorded the fragment “come out to show them” on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech’s rhythmic and tonal patterns.
Reich’s first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967 Piano Phase , for two pianos. In Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Violin Phase , also written in 1967, is built on these same lines. Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.
A similar, lesser known example of this so-called process music is Pendulum Music (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing feedback as they do so. “Pendulum Music” has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.
Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece “that would need no instrument beyond the human body”. He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed Clapping Music (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long (12-eighth-note-long) phrase and the other performer shifts by one quaver beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later.
The 1967 prototype piece Slow Motion Sound was not performed although Chris Hughes performed it 27 years later as Slow Motion Blackbird on his Reich-influenced 1994 album Shift . It introduced the idea of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre, which Reich applied to Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has maracas playing a fast eighth note pulse , while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with repetition and subtle rhythmic change. It is unique in the context of Reich’s other pieces in being linear as opposed to cyclic like his earlier works— the superficially similar Phase Patterns , also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a phase piece similar to others composed during the period. Four Organs was performed as part of a Boston Symphony Orchestra program, and was Reich’s first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting.
1970s [edit ]
In 1971, Reich embarked on a five-week trip to study music in Ghana , during which he learned from the master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie. Reich also studied Balinese gamelan in Seattle . From his African experience, as well as A. M. Jones ‘s Studies in African Music about the music of the Ewe people, Reich drew inspiration for his 90-minute piece Drumming , which he composed shortly after his return. Composed for a nine-piece percussion ensemble with female voices and piccolo , Drumming marked the beginning of a new stage in his career, for around this time he formed his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians , and increasingly concentrated on composition and performance with them. Steve Reich and Musicians, which was to be the sole ensemble to interpret his works for many years, still remains active with many of its original members.
After Drumming , Reich moved on from the “phase shifting” technique that he had pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Six Pianos (1973).
In 1974, Reich began writing what many would call his seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians . This piece involved many new ideas, although it also hearkened back to earlier pieces. It is based on a cycle of eleven chords introduced at the beginning (called “Pulses”), followed by a small section of music based on each chord (“Sections I-XI”), and finally a return to the original cycle (“Pulses”). This was Reich’s first attempt at writing for larger ensembles . The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would like to “explore this idea further”. Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any other work he had written. Steve Reich and Musicians made the premier recording of this work on ECM Records .
Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and Octet (1979). In these two works, Reich experimented with “the human breath as the measure of musical duration … the chords played by the trumpets are written to take one comfortable breath to perform”. [12] Human voices are part of the musical palette in Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in Drumming ). With Octet and his first orchestral piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich’s music showed the influence of Biblical cantillation , which he had studied in Israel since the summer of 1977. After this, the human voice singing a text would play an increasingly important role in Reich’s music.
“
The technique […] consists of taking pre-existing melodic patterns and stringing them together to form a longer melody in the service of a holy text. If you take away the text, you’re left with the idea of putting together small motives to make longer melodies – a technique I had not encountered before. [13]
”
In 1974 Reich published the book Writings About Music , containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated and much more extensive collection, Writings On Music (1965–2000) , was published in 2002.
1980s [edit ]
Reich’s work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage. Tehillim (1981), Hebrew for psalms , is the first of Reich’s works to draw explicitly on his Jewish background. The work is in four parts, and is scored for an ensemble of four women’s voices (one high soprano , two lyric sopranos and one alto ), piccolo , flute , oboe , English horn , two clarinets , six percussion (playing small tuned tambourines without jingles, clapping, maracas , marimba , vibraphone and crotales ), two electronic organs , two violins, viola , cello and double bass , with amplified voices, strings, and winds. A setting of texts from psalms 19:2–5 (19:1–4 in Christian translations), 34:13–15 (34:12–14), 18:26–27 (18:25–26), and 150:4–6, Tehillim is a departure from Reich’s other work in its formal structure; the setting of texts several lines long rather than the fragments used in previous works makes melody a substantive element. Use of formal counterpoint and functional harmony also contrasts with the loosely structured minimalist works written previously.
Different Trains (1988), for string quartet and tape, uses recorded speech, as in his earlier works, but this time as a melodic rather than a rhythmic element. In Different Trains Reich compares and contrasts his childhood memories of his train journeys between New York and California in 1939–1941 with the very different trains being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under Nazi rule. The Kronos Quartet recording of Different Trains was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990. The composition was described by Richard Taruskin as “the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium—to the Holocaust “, and he credited the piece with earning Reich a place among the great composers of the 20th century. [14]
1990s to present [edit ]
In 1993, Reich collaborated with his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot , on an opera, The Cave , which explores the roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the words of Israelis , Palestinians , and Americans , echoed musically by the ensemble. The work, for percussion, voices, and strings, is a musical documentary, named for the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron , where a mosque now stands and Abraham is said to have been buried. The two collaborated again on the opera Three Tales , which concerns the Hindenburg disaster , the testing of nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll , and other more modern concerns, specifically Dolly the sheep , cloning , and the technological singularity .
As well as pieces using sampling techniques, like Three Tales and City Life (1994), Reich also returned to composing purely instrumental works for the concert hall, starting with Triple Quartet (1998) written for the Kronos Quartet that can either be performed by string quartet and tape, three string quartets or 36-piece string orchestra. According to Reich, the piece is influenced by Bartók ‘s and Alfred Schnittke ‘s string quartets, and Michael Gordon ‘s Yo Shakespeare . [15] This series continued with Dance Patterns (2002), Cello Counterpoint (2003), and sequence of works centered around Variations: You Are (Variations) (2004) (a work which looks back to the vocal writing of works like Tehillim or The Desert Music ), Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005, for the London Sinfonietta ) and Daniel Variations (2006).
Invited by Walter Fink , he was the 12th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2002.
In an interview with The Guardian , Reich stated that he continues to follow this direction with his piece Double Sextet (2007), which was commissioned by eighth blackbird , an American ensemble consisting of the instrumental quintet (flute , clarinet , violin or viola , cello and piano) of Schoenberg ‘s piece Pierrot Lunaire (1912) plus percussion. Reich states that he was thinking about Stravinsky’s Agon (1957) as a model for the instrumental writing.
Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music, on April 20, 2009, for Double Sextet . [16]
December 2010 Nonesuch Records and Indaba Music held a community remix contest in which over 250 submissions were received, and Steve Reich and Christian Carey judged the finals. Reich spoke in a related BBC interview that once he composed a piece he would not alter it again himself; “When it’s done, it’s done,” he said. On the other hand he acknowledged that remixes have an old tradition e.g. famous religious music pieces where melodies were further developed into new songs. [17]
In May 2011, Steve Reich received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music . [18]
Influence [edit ]
Reich’s style of composition has influenced many other composers and musical groups, including John Adams , the progressive rock band King Crimson , the new-age guitarist Michael Hedges , the art-pop and electronic musician Brian Eno , the experimental art/music group The Residents , the composers associated with the Bang on a Can festival (including David Lang , Michael Gordon , and Julia Wolfe ), and numerous indie rock musicians including songwriter Sufjan Stevens [19][20] and instrumental ensembles Tortoise , [21][22][23] The Mercury Program (themselves influenced by Tortoise), [24] Godspeed You! Black Emperor composed a song, unreleased, entitled “Steve Reich”. [25]
John Adams commented, “He didn’t reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride.” [26] He has also influenced visual artists such as Bruce Nauman , and many notable choreographers have made dances to his music, Eliot Feld , Jiří Kylián , Douglas Lee and Jerome Robbins among others; he has expressed particular admiration of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker ‘s work set to his pieces.
In featuring a sample of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint (1987) the British ambient techno act the Orb exposed a new generation of listeners to the composer’s music with its 1990 production Little Fluffy Clouds . [27] In 1999 the album Reich Remixed featured “re-mixes ” of a number of Reich’s works by various electronic dance-music producers, such as DJ Spooky , Kurtis Mantronik , Ken Ishii , and Coldcut amongst others. [27][28]
Reich often cites Pérotin , J.S. Bach , Debussy , Bartók , and Stravinsky as composers whom he admires and who greatly influenced him when he was young. [29] Jazz is a major part of the formation of Reich’s musical style, and two of the earliest influences on his work were vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Alfred Deller , whose emphasis on the artistic capabilities of the voice alone with little vibrato or other alteration was an inspiration to his earliest works. John Coltrane ‘s style, which Reich has described as “playing a lot of notes to very few harmonies”, also had an impact; of particular interest was the album Africa/Brass , which “was basically a half-an-hour in F.” [30] Reich’s influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana. Other important influences are Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis , and visual artist friends such as Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra . Reich has also stated that he admires the music of the band Radiohead , which led to his composition Radio Rewrite . [31] Reich recently contributed the introduction to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky .
Recent projects [edit ]
Reich has the world premiere of a piece, WTC 9/11 , written for String Quartet and Tape, a similar instrumentation to that of Different Trains . It was premiered in March 2011 by the Kronos Quartet , at Duke University , North Carolina, USA. [ citation needed ]
On March 5, 2013 the London Sinfonietta , conducted by Brad Lubman, at the Royal Festival Hall in London gave the world premiere of Radio Rewrite (for ensemble with 11 players), inspired by the music of Radiohead . The programme also included Double Sextet (for ensemble with 12 players), Clapping Music , for two people and four hands (featuring Reich himself), Electric Counterpoint , with electric guitar by Mats Bergstrom accompanied by a layered soundtrack, as well as two of Reich’s small ensemble pieces, one for acoustic instruments, the other for electric instruments and tape. [32]
Quotations [edit ]
[…] I drove a cab in San Francisco, and in New York I worked as a part-time social worker. Phil Glass and I had a moving company for a short period of time. I did all kinds of odd jobs […] I started making a living as a performer in my own ensemble. I would never have thought that it was how I was going to survive financially. It was a complete wonder.
—From an interview with Richard Kessler, 1998 [33]
The point is, if you went to Paris and dug up Debussy and said, ‘Excusez-moi Monsieur…are you an impressionist?’ he’d probably say ‘Merde!’ and go back to sleep. That is a legitimate concern of musicologists, music historians, and journalists, and it’s a convenient way of referring to me, Riley, Glass, La Monte Young […] it’s become the dominant style. But, anybody who’s interested in French Impressionism is interested in how different Debussy and Ravel and Satie are—and ditto for what’s called minimalism . […] Basically, those kind of words are taken from painting and sculpture, and applied to musicians who composed at the same period as that painting and sculpture was made […].
—From an Interview with Rebecca Y. Kim , 2000 [34]
All musicians in the past, starting with the middle ages were interested in popular music. (…) Béla Bartók ‘s music is made entirely of sources from Hungarian folk music . And Igor Stravinsky , although he lied about it, used all kinds of Russian sources for his early ballets. Kurt Weill’s great masterpiece Dreigroschenoper is using the cabaret -style of the Weimar Republic and that’s why it is such a masterpiece. Only artificial division between popular and classical music happened unfortunately through the blindness of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers to create an artificial wall, which never existed before him. In my generation we tore the wall down and now we are back to the normal situation, for example if Brian Eno or David Bowie come to me, and if popular musicians remix my music like The Orb or DJ Spooky it is a good thing. This is a natural normal regular historical way.
—From an Interview with Jakob Buhre [35]
Sequence
The music sequencer (or simply sequencer ) is a device or computer software to record, edit, play back the music , by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically : MIDI , CV/Gate , and possibly audio and automation data for Plug-ins and DAWs . [note 1][note 2]
▪ MIDI data (on MIDI sequencers)
▪ CV/Gate data (on analog sequencers and others)
And also possibly includes :
▪ Automation data for Plug-ins and DAWs (software sequencers with DAW feature and software instrument /effect Plug-ins on them)
▪ Audio data (on audio sequencers [note 3] including DAWs, loop-based music software , or on phrase samplers including groove machine , etc )
Note that computer software (or dedicated systems) mainly handle digital audio are traditionally called “Digital audio workstation ” (DAW). Also note that normally, bare music sequencer doesn’t directly handle audio; instead, musical instruments/effects devices controlled by sequencers, or audio engines/DAWs integrated with software sequencers, are used to handle audio.
[edit ]
The music sequencer (or simply sequencer ) is a device or computer software to record, edit, play back the music , by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically : MIDI , CV/Gate , and possibly audio and automation data for Plug-ins and DAWs . [note 1][note 2]
▪ MIDI data (on MIDI sequencers)
▪ CV/Gate data (on analog sequencers and others)
And also possibly includes :
▪ Automation data for Plug-ins and DAWs (software sequencers with DAW feature and software instrument /effect Plug-ins on them)
▪ Audio data (on audio sequencers [note 3] including DAWs, loop-based music software , or on phrase samplers including groove machine , etc )
Modern sequencers
1980s typical platform of software sequencer.
Typical interface on software sequencer integrated with DAW
With the advent of MIDI and particularly Atari ST in 1980s, programmers were able to write software that could record and play back the notes played by a musician. Unlike the early sequencers used to play mechanical sounding sequence with exactly equal length, the new ones recorded and played back expressive performances by real musicians. These were typically used to control external synthesizers , especially rackmounted sound modules as it was no longer necessary for each synthesizer to have its own keyboard.
As the technology matured, sequencers gained more features, and integrated the ability to record multitrack audio . Sequencers mainly used for audio are often called digital audio workstations (or DAWs).
Many modern sequencers can also control virtual instruments implemented as software plug-ins , allowing musicians to replace separate synthesizers with software equivalents.
In today, the term “sequencer” is often used for software, however, also hardwares sequencers are remained. Workstation keyboards have their own proprietary built-in MIDI sequencers. Drum machines and some older synthesizers have their own step sequencer built in. There are still also standalone hardware MIDI sequencers, although the market demand for those has diminished greatly due to the greater feature set of their software counterparts.
See #Software sequencers / DAWs with sequencing features for detail listing.
[edit ]
Type of music sequencers
Music sequencers can be categorized with its sequence mode (or record mode):
Realtime sequencer
on electronic keyboard.
Realtime mode : On the realtime sequencer , musical notes are recorded in realtime as on audio recorder , and played back with designated pitch , tempo and quantization . For realtime editing, “punch in/punch out ” features are often supported, however, to edit details, another editing mode may be needed. Built-in sequencers on electronic keyboards often support realtime mode.
on bass machine.
Step mode : On the step sequencer , musical notes are divided into steps, and each steps are recorded without exact timing. Instead, timing of each step are separately designated by order of entering steps (on bass machines), or selection of column buttons (on drum machines). Analog drum machines and bass machines often utilize this mode, along with semi-realtime mode.
Analog sequencer
Analog sequencers are sometimes confused with step sequencer s, however, concepts of realtimeness and tempo are significantly different. Typical analog sequencers were designed for realtime composition and performance using multiple knobs/sliders, so, notes on sequence are always changeable without entering record mode. In addition, time between each notes (steps) are also adjustable independently.
▪ Software sequencers , in general, tend to support various sequence modes. Modern software sequencers with DAW features often support: piano rolls , strip charts , score edit , numerical edit , and also audio sequencing including rearrangement of sample loops , beat slicing , and pitch manipulation . Several sequencers are specialized to particular sequence mode: for example, loop-based music software specializing audio sequencer , software drum machines specializing step sequencer, etc .
Earlier sequencers
See also: Category:Mechanical musical instruments and Music box#Evolving box production
The earlier music sequencers had appeared in the form of various automatic musical instruments , including music boxes , mechanical organs , player pianos , etc . For example, authoring of piano roll resemble the definition of music sequencer . Several composers record ed their composition on piano rolls, then specialists edit ed rolls for the preparation of mass duplication, and finally consumers play ed back music on their player piano.
The origin of automatic musical instruments seems considerably old. As early as 9th century, Persian inventors Banū Mūsā brothers invented hydropowered organ using exchangeable cylinders with pins, [2] and also automatic flute player using steam power , [3][4] as described on their Book of Ingenious Devices . In 14th century, rotating cylinder with pins were used to play carillon in Flanders, [ citation needed ] and at least in 15th century, barrel organs were seen in the Netherlands. [5] In 19th century, as the result of the Industrial Revolution , various automatic musical instruments were invented, includes music box , barrel organ and barrel piano using barrel / cylinder / metal disc with pins, or mechanical organ , orchestrion and player piano using book music / music rolls (piano rolls ) with punched holes, etc . These instruments widely spread as the popular entertainment devices, before the invention of phonograph and radio .
Also in 20th century, earliest programmable music synthesizers , RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer in 1957, and Siemens Synthesizer in 1959, were controlled via punch tapes similar to piano rolls . [6][7]
On the other hand, Raymond Scott , an American composer of electronic music, invented various music sequencers during 1940s–1960s for his electric compositions. The Wall of Sound , once covered on the wall of his studio in 1940s, was a electro-mechanical sequencer to produce rhythmic patterns, consisted with stepping relays (used on dial pulse telephone exchange ), solenoids , control switches, and tone circuits with 16 individual oscillators . [8] Later, Robert Moog explained it “the whole room would go ‘clack – clack – clack’, and the sounds would come out all over the place ”. [9] The Circle Machine , developed in 1959, had dimmer bulbs arranged in a ring, and a rotating arm with photocell scanning over the ring, to generate arbitrary waveform. [10] And relatively well known Clavivox , developed since 1952, was a kind of keyboard synthesizer with sequencer. [ verification needed ] On its prototype, theremin manufactured by young Robert Moog was utilized to enable portamento over 3-octave range, and on later version, instead photographic film and photocell were utilized to control pitch by voltage . [9]
With the relation to the photographic films, the drawn sound technique that appeared in the late 1920s, may be also important as a precursor of today’s intuitive graphical user interfaces . On this technique, notes and various sound parameters were controlled by hand-drawn waves on the films, resembling piano rolls or strip charts on the modern sequencers/DAWs. It was often utilized on early experiments of electronic music, including “Variophone ” developed by Yevgeny Sholpo in 1930, and Oramics designed by Daphne Oram in 1957, etc .
One of the earliest commercially available analog sequencer (front) on Buchla 100 (1964/1966) [11][12]
Moog sequencer module (left, probably added after 1968) on Moog Modular (1964)
[edit ]
Analog sequencers
Main article: Analog sequencer
Step sequencers
Eko ComputeRhythm (1972), [13][14] one of the earliest programm-
able drum machine
Firstman SQ-01 (1980), [15] one of the earliest step bass machine
See also: Drum machine , Acid bass machine , and Groovebox
The step sequencer s played rigid patterns of notes using a grid of (usually) 16 buttons, or steps, each step being 1/16 of a measure . These patterns of notes were then chained together to form longer compositions. Sequencers of this kind are still in use, mostly built into drum machines and grooveboxes . They are monophonic by nature, although some are multi-timbral , meaning that they can control several different sounds but only play one note on each of those sounds. [ clarification needed ]
[edit ]
Computer music
Main article: Computer music
On the other hand, software sequencers were continuously utilized since 1950s, in the context of computer music , including computer played music (software sequencer), computer composed music (music synthesis ), and computer sound generation (sound synthesis ). In June 1951, first computer music Colonel Bogey was played on CSIRAC , Australia’s first digital computer. [16][17] In 1956, Lejaren Hiller at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote an earliest program for computer music composition on ILLIAC , and collaborated on the first piece, Illiac Suite for String Quartet , with Leonard Issaction . [18] In 1957, Max Mathews at Bell Labs wrote MUSIC , a first widely-used program for sound generation , and 17 second composition was performed by the IBM 704 computer. Since then, computer music were mainly researched on the expensive mainframe computers at the computer centers, until minicomputers and later microcomputers went into practice on this field in 1970s.
[edit ]
Digital sequencers
EMS Sequencer 256 (1971), branched product from Synthi 100
Roland MC-4 (1981), a successor of MC-8 (1977)
In 1971, Electronic Music Studios (EMS) released one of the first digital sequencer products as a module of Synthi 100 , and separated products Synthi Sequencer series . [19][20] After then, Oberheim released DS-2 Digital Sequencer in 1974, [21] , and Sequential Circuits released Model 800 in 1977 [22]
Also in 1977, Roland Corporation released their first microcomputer -based digital sequencer, MC-8 Microcomposer , also called computer music composer by Roland. [23] It equipped keypad to enter note in numeric code, 16KB RAM for maximum 5200 notes (large enough at that time), and polyphony function which allocates multiple pitch CV into single Gate . [24] The earliest known user was Yellow Magic Orchestra , an electronic music group in 1978, [25] they created new sounds not possible until then. [ peacock term ] [26] [ not in citation given ]
[edit ]
Software sequencers
Synclavier I (1977)
Fairlight CMI (1979)
See also: Music workstation , Groovebox , and Tracker (music software)
In 1975, New England Digital (NED) released ABLE computer (microcomputer) [27] as a dedicated data processing unit for Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer (1973), and based on it, later Synclavier series were developed. Synclavier I , released in September 1977, [28] was one of the earlier digital music workstation product with multitrack sequencer. Synclavier series evolved throughout late 1970s–mid 1980s, and they integrated digital-audio and music-sequencer, on the Direct-to-Disk option in 1984, and later Tapeless Studio system.
In 1980, renewed Fairlight CMI Series II with its sequencer, “Page R ”, combined step sequencing with sample playback. In 1987, this led to the development of similar software sequencers of this kind, called Trackers , which became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as simple sequencers for creating computer game music , and are yet popular in the Demoscene and Chiptunes .
[edit ]
Short timeline of rhythm sequencers
Main articles: Drum machines , Groovebox , and Beat slicing
Many synthesizers, and by definition all workstations and drum machines, contain their own sequencers.
Following are specifically designed to function primarily as sequencers :
[edit ]
Rotating object with pins
▪ Barrel or cylinder with pins (since 9th or 14th century) utilized on barrel organs , carillons , music boxes
▪ Disc with pins — utilized on several barrel organs
[edit ]
Punched paper
▪ Book music (since 1890) utilized on several mechanical organs
▪ Music roll utilized on player pianos (using piano rolls ), Orchestrions , several mechanical organs, etc .
▪ Punch tape system for earlier studio synthesizers
▪ RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (1957) Room-filling device built in 1957 for half a million dollars. Included a 4-polyphony synth with 12 oscillators, a sequencer fed with wide paper tape, and output were recorded on a shellac record lathe.
▪ Siemens Synthesizer (1959) [7]
[edit ]
Sound-on-film
▪ Variophone (1930) — on earlier version, hand drawn waves on film or disc were used to synthesize sound, and later versions were promised to experiment on musical intonations and temporal characteristics of live music performance, however not finished. Variophone is often referred as a forerunner of drawn sound system including ANS synthesizer and Oramics .
▪ Composer-Tron (1953) — rhythmical sequences were controlled via marking cue on film, while timbre of note or envelope shape of sound were defined via shapes hand drawn with a grease pencil on a surface of CRT input device. [29]
▪ ANS synthesizer (1957) — An earliest realtime additive synthesizer using 720 microtonal sine waves (1/6 semitones × 10 octaves ) generated by five glas discs. Composers could control time evolution of amplitudes of each microtones via scratches on glass plate user interface covered with black mastic .
▪ Oramics (1957) — hand drawn contours on a set of ten sprocketed synchronized strips of 35 film were used to control various parameters of monophonic sound generator (frequency, timbre, amplitude and duration). [30] Polyphonic sounds were obtained using multitrack recording technique.
[edit ]
Electro-mechanical sequencers
▪ Wall of Sound (mid 1940s–1950s) — earlier electro-mechanical sequencer developed by Raymond Scott to produce rhythmic patterns, consistead with stepping relays, solenoids, and tone generators. [8]
▪ Circle Machine (1959) — electro-optical rotary sequencer developed by Raymond Scott to generate arbitrary waveforms, consisted with dimmer bulbs arranged in a ring, and a rotating arm with photocell scanning over the ring. [10]
[edit ]
Analog sequencers
Analog sequencers with CV/Gate interface
▪ Sequencers on Buchla 100 (1964/1966–) — One of the earliest analog sequencer in the modular synthesizer era since 1960. Later, Robert Moog admired Buchla’s unique works including it. [11][12]
▪ Moog 960 Sequential Controller [31] / 961 Interface [32] / 962 Sequential Switch [33] (c.1968) [34] modules for the Moog modular synthesizer system, a popular analog sequencer following earlier Buchla sequencer.
[edit ]
See also
[edit ]
Notes
1. ^ On today, software music sequencers integrated with DAWs are often supporting digital audio . However, bare music sequencers normally not directly handle the digital audio (except for “audio sequencers ” which often means DAW). Instead, the audio engine consisted with DAW and plug-in host handles digital audio, and collaborates with bare music sequencer for synchronization and automation. Thus, handling of digital audio is not the essential role of music sequencers, in general.
2. ^ Similarly, today’s software music sequencers often mainly support MIDI and plug-ins (running on plug-in host). However, these are not essential on generic definition of music sequencers. On the long history of electronic music, various type of music sequencers handled various forms of music information, as following:
▪ Analog sequencers handle analog control data (ex. CV/Gate )
▪ Several digital devices/music software handle proprietary digital format data on its sequencer. (ex. earlier Music workstations and sequencers developed before MIDI era, self-contained integrated environments, or relatively simple devices without MIDI/USB IF).
▪ Plug-in ‘s numerous parameters and DAW’s automation data are often handled without MIDI mapping; in the case, these data might be clearly non MIDI data.
3.
4.
IRCAM AudioSculpt (1994) enabled graphical editing of audio spectrogram , and opened up new horizon of musical note manipulation on audio tracks.
▪ Also modern integrated DAWs often manipulate notes on the audio tracks in the analogy of MIDI notes, with the help of “beat slicing ” (ex. ReCycle! (1992)), “independent control of pitch/time ” (ex. loop-based music software such as ACID Pro (1998), Ableton Live (2001), GarageBand (2004)), or various “source separation ” technique (ex. IRCAM AudioSculpt (1994), Melodyne Direct Note Access (DNA) (2008/2011), Roland R-MIX (2011)), without MIDI mapping.
▪ More over, piano rolls and drawn sound interfaces appeared in the last century are still used on modern sequencers/DAWs as graphical user interfaces.
5.Over the all, definition of music sequencer shouldn’t be limited with specific data formats. Instead, more generic information including notes and performance information, various control parameters of instruments/effects/DAWs, and even audio data itself, should be taken into account.
6. ^ The term “audio sequencer ” seems to be relatively new expression and seems to be not clearly defined, yet. For example, “DAW integrated with MIDI sequencer” is often referred as “Audio and MIDI sequencer”. However, in this usage, the term “audio sequencer” is just a synonym for the “DAW”, and beyond the scope of this article. In that case, please check Digital audio workstation .
External links
▪ A list of software DAWs, Sequencers, Hosts, etc.
▪ Audio Sequencers on Shareware Music Machine
▪ MIDI Sequencers on Shareware Music Machine
▪ Early sequencer controllers from the Vintage Synth Explorer
▪ The sequencer comparison chart
▪ Early Roland sequencers (1977–1984)
▪ 1974 newspaper article about digital sequencer
The pre-digital history of sequencing
Â
Definition of SEQUENCE
1
: Â a hymn in irregular meter between the gradual and Gospel in masses for special occasions (as Easter)
2
:  a continuous or connected series: as a  :  an extended series of poems united by a single theme <a sonnet sequence >
Â
b  :  three or more playing cards usually of the same suit in consecutive order of rank
c  :  a succession of repetitions of a melodic phrase or harmonic pattern each in a new position d  :  a set of elements ordered so that they can be labeled with the positive integers
e  :  the exact order of bases in a nucleic acid or of amino acids in a protein
f (1)  :  a succession of related shots or scenes developing a single subject or phase of a film storyÂ
(2) Â : Â episode
a  :  order of succession b  :  an arrangement of the tenses of successive verbs in a sentence designed to express a coherent relationship especially between main and subordinate parts
:  continuity of progression <the narrative sequence >
Â
Origin of SEQUENCE
Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latinsequentia,  from Late Latin, sequel, literally, act of following, from Latin sequent-, sequens,  present participle of sequi
First Known Use: 14th century
Â
A sequence  (Latin: sequentia ) is a chant or hymn sung or recited during the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist for many Christian denominations, before the proclamation of the Gospel. By the time of the Council of Trent (1543-1563) there were sequences for many feasts in the Church’s year.
In film, a sequence  is a series of scenes which form a distinct narrative unit, usually connected either by unity of location or unity of time. For example a heist film might include an extended recruitment sequence in which the leader of the gang collects together the conspirators, a robbery sequence, an escape sequence, and so on. Each of these sequences might further contain sub-sequences; for example the robbery sequence might consist of an entry sequence, a safe-cracking sequence, and so on.
The sequence is one of a hierarchy of structural units used to describe the structure of films in varying degrees of granularity. Analysed this way, a film is composed of one or more acts; acts include one or more sequences; sequences comprise one or more scenes; and scenes may be thought of as being built out of shots (if one is thinking visually) or beats  (if one is thinking in narrative terms).
The sequence paradigm of screenwriting was developed by Frank Daniel .
The music sequencer (or simply sequencer) is a device or computer software to record, edit, play back the music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically : MIDI, CV/Gate, and possibly audio and automation data for Plug-ins and DAWs.
Typical interface on software sequencer integrated with DAW
With the advent of MIDI and particularly Atari ST in 1980s, programmers were able to write software that could record and play back the notes played by a musician. Unlike the early sequencers used to play mechanical sounding sequence with exactly equal length, the new ones recorded and played back expressive performances by real musicians. These were typically used to control external synthesizers, especially rackmounted sound modules as it was no longer necessary for each synthesizer to have its own keyboard.
Commodore 64 SID
As the technology matured, sequencers gained more features, and integrated the ability to record multitrack audio. Sequencers mainly used for audio are often called digital audio workstations (or DAWs).
Many modern sequencers can also control virtual instruments implemented as software plug-ins, allowing musicians to replace separate synthesizers with software equivalents.
.
Realtime mode: On the realtime sequencer, musical notes are recorded in realtime as on audio recorder, and played back with designated pitch, tempo and quantization. For realtime editing, “punch in/punch out” features are often supported, however, to edit details, another editing mode may be needed. Built-in sequencers on electronic keyboards often support realtime mode.
The earlier music sequencers had appeared in the form of various automatic musical instruments, including music boxes, mechanical organs, player pianos, etc. For example, authoring of piano roll resemble the definition of music sequencer. Several composers recorded their composition on piano rolls, then specialists edited rolls for the preparation of mass duplication, and finally consumers played back music on their player piano.
The origin of automatic musical instruments seems considerably old. As early as 9th century, Persian inventors BanÅ« MÅ«sÄ brothers invented hydropowered organ using exchangeable cylinders with pins, and also automatic flute player using steam power, as described on their Book of Ingenious Devices. In 14th century, rotating cylinder with pins were used to play carillon in Flanders,[citation needed] and at least in 15th century, barrel organs were seen in the Netherlands. In 19th century, as the result of the Industrial Revolution, various automatic musical instruments were invented, includes music box, barrel organ and barrel piano using barrel / cylinder / metal disc with pins, or mechanical organ, orchestrion and player piano using book music / music rolls (piano rolls) with punched holes, etc. These instruments widely spread as the popular entertainment devices, before the invention of phonograph and radio.
Also in 20th century, earliest programmable music synthesizers , RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer in 1957, and Siemens Synthesizer in 1959, were controlled via punch tapes similar to piano rolls.
On the other hand, Raymond Scott, an American composer of electronic music, invented various music sequencers during 1940s–1960s for his electric compositions. The Wall of Sound, once covered on the wall of his studio in 1940s, was a electro-mechanical sequencer to produce rhythmic patterns, consisted with stepping relays (used on dial pulse telephone exchange), solenoids, control switches, and tone circuits with 16 individual oscillators. [8] Later, Robert Moog explained it “the whole room would go ‘clack – clack – clack’, and the sounds would come out all over the placeâ€.[9] The Circle Machine, developed in 1959, had dimmer bulbs arranged in a ring, and a rotating arm with photocell scanning over the ring, to generate arbitrary waveform.[10] And relatively well known Clavivox, developed since 1952, was a kind of keyboard synthesizer with sequencer.[verification needed] On its prototype, theremin manufactured by young Robert Moog was utilized to enable portamento over 3-octave range, and on later version, instead photographic film and photocell were utilized to control pitch by voltage. [9]
With the relation to the photographic films, the drawn sound technique that appeared in the late 1920s, may be also important as a precursor of today’s intuitive graphical user interfaces. On this technique, notes and various sound parameters were controlled by hand-drawn waves on the films, resembling piano rolls or strip charts on the modern sequencers/DAWs. It was often utilized on early experiments of electronic music, including “Variophone” developed by Yevgeny Sholpo in 1930, and Oramics designed by Daphne Oram in 1957, etc.
On the other hand, software sequencers were continuously utilized since 1950s, in the context of computer music, including computer played music (software sequencer), computer composed music (music synthesis), and computer sound generation (sound synthesis).
Â
Short timeline of rhythm sequencers
Following are specifically designed to function primarily as sequencers:
Rotating object with pins
â–ª Barrel or cylinder with pins (since 9th or 14th century) utilized on barrel organs, carillons, music boxes
▪ Disc with pins — utilized on several barrel organs
[edit]
Punched paper
â–ª Book music (since 1890) utilized on several mechanical organs
â–ª Music roll utilized on player pianos (using piano rolls), Orchestrions, several mechanical organs, etc.
â–ª Punch tape system for earlier studio synthesizers
â–ª RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (1957) Room-filling device built in 1957 for half a million dollars. Included a 4-polyphony synth with 12 oscillators, a sequencer fed with wide paper tape, and output were recorded on a shellac record lathe.
â–ª Siemens Synthesizer (1959)[7]
Sound-on-film
▪ Variophone (1930) — on earlier version, hand drawn waves on film or disc were used to synthesize sound, and later versions were promised to experiment on musical intonations and temporal characteristics of live music performance, however not finished. Variophone is often referred as a forerunner of drawn sound system including ANS synthesizer and Oramics.
Â
Sample
vvvv
The first samples came from music concrete
Sample and Scratch and inching
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically manipulated tape loops or vinyl records on a phonograph.
In the late 1960s, the use of tape loop sampling influenced the development of minimalist music and the production of psychedelic rock and jazz fusion. In the 1970s, DJs who experimented with manipulating vinyl on two turntables gave birth to hip hop music, the first popular music genre based originally around the art of sampling. The widespread use of sampling in popular music increased with the rise of electronic music and disco in the mid 1970s to early 1980s, the development of electronic dance music and industrial music in the 1980s, and the worldwide influence of hip hop since the 1980s on genres ranging from contemporary R&B to indie rock.
Since that time sampling is often done with a sampler, originally a piece of hardware, but today, more commonly a computer program. Vinyl emulation software may also be used, however, and many turntablists continue to sample using traditional methods.
Often “samples” consist of one part of a song, such as a rhythm break, which is then used to construct the beat for another song. For instance, hip hop music developed from DJs repeating the breaks from songs to enable continuous dancing.[1] The Funky drummer break and the Amen break, both brief fragments taken from soul and funk music recordings of the 1960s, have been among the most common samples used in dance music and hip hop of recent decades, with some entire subgenres like breakbeat being based largely on complex permutations of a single one of these samples.
Â
Often, samples are not taken from other music, but from spoken words, including those in non-musical media such as movies, TV shows and advertising. Sampling does not necessarily mean using pre-existing recordings. A number of composers and musicians have constructed pieces or songs by sampling field recordings they made themselves, and others have sampled their own original recordings.
The use of sampling is controversial legally and musically. Experimental musicians who pioneered the technique in the 1940s to the 1960s sometimes did not inform or receive permission from the subjects of their field recordings or from copyright owners before constructing a musical piece out of these samples. In the 1970s, when hip hop was confined to local dance parties, it was unnecessary to obtain copyright clearance in order to sample recorded music at these parties. As the genre became a recorded form centred around rapping in the 1980s and subsequently went mainstream, it became necessary to pay to obtain legal clearance for samples, which was difficult for all but the most successful DJs, producers and rappers. As a result, a number of recording artists ran into legal trouble for uncredited samples, while the restrictiveness of current US copyright laws and their global impact on creativity also came under increased scrutiny. The hip hop genre also shifted toward a wider aesthetic in which sampling was only one method of constructing beats, with many producers instead crafting wholly original recordings to serve as backing tracks. Aside from legal issues, sampling has been both championed and criticized. Hip hop DJs today take different approaches to sampling, with some critical of its obvious use. Some critics, particularly those with a rockist outlook, have expressed the belief all sampling is lacking in creativity, while others say sampling has been innovative and revolutionary. Those whose own work has been sampled have also voiced a wide variety of opinions about the practice, both for and against sampling.
Loop- and sample-based music
Music workstations and samplers use samples of musical instruments as the basis of their own sounds, and are capable of playing a sample back at any pitch. Many modern synthesizers and drum machines also use samples as the basis of their sounds. (See sample-based synthesis for more information.) Most such samples are created in professional recording studios using world-class instruments played by accomplished musicians. These are usually developed by the manufacturer of the instrument or by a subcontractor who specializes in creating such samples. There are businesses and individuals who create libraries of samples of musical instruments. Of course, a sampler allows anyone to create such samples.
Possibly the earliest equipment used to sample recorded instrument sounds are the Chamberlin, which was developed in the 1940s, and its better-known cousin, the Mellotron, marketed in England in the 1960s. Both are tape replay keyboards, in which each key pressed triggers a prerecorded tape loop of a single note.
Musicians can reproduce the same samples of break beats like the “Amen” break which was composed, produced and mastered by the Winston Brothers in 1960s. Producers in the early 1990s have used the whole 5.66 second sample; but music workstations like the Korg Electribe Series (EM-1, ES-1; EMX-1 and the ESX-1) have used the “Amen” kick, hi hat and snare in their sound wave libraries for free use. Sampler production companies have managed to use these samples for pitch, attack and decay and DSP effects to each drum sound. These features allow producers to manipulate samples to match other parts of the composition.
Most sample sets consist of multiple samples at different pitches. These are combined into keymaps, that associate each sample with a particular pitch or pitch range. Often, these sample maps may have different layers as well, so that different velocities can trigger a different sample.
Samples used in musical instruments sometimes have a looped component. An instrument with indefinite sustain, such as a pipe organ, does not need to be represented by a very long sample because the sustained portion of the timbre is looped. The sampler (or other sample playback instrument) plays the attack and decay portion of the sample followed by the looped sustain portion for as long as the note is held, then plays the release portion of the sample.
To conserve polyphony, a workstation may allow the user to sample a layer of sounds (piano, strings, and voices, for example) so they can be played together as one sound instead of three. This leaves more of the instruments’ resources available to generate additional sounds.
There are several genres of music in which it is commonplace for an artist to sample a phrase of a well-known recording and use it as an element in a new composition. A well-known example includes the sample of Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” (1981) in Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” (1990). Some of the earliest examples in popular electronic music were from Yellow Magic Orchestra,[2][3] such as “Computer Game / Firecracker” (1978) sampling a Martin Denny melody[4] and Space Invaders[5] game sounds,[4] while Technodelic (1981) was one of the first albums to feature mostly samples and loops.
On MC Hammer’s album Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em, the successful single “U Can’t Touch This” sampled Rick James’ 1981
The Isley Brothers’ song Between The Sheets is a song heavily sampled by many different artists, most notably Notorious BIG’s Big Poppa, and Gwen Stefani’s Luxurious.
Another example is in 1997, when Sean Combs collaborated with Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin on the song “Come with Me” for the Godzilla film. The track sampled the Led Zeppelin song “Kashmir” (approved by Jimmy Page). “I’ll Be Missing You” sampled the melody and some of the lyrics from The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” from 1983. The single also borrows the melody from the well-known American spiritual “I’ll Fly Away.”
In the late 80s, then-N.W.A producer Dr. Dre was already experimenting the use of samples from 70s moog synthesizer-based funk songs, such as “Funky Worm” by the Ohio Players, which he first sampled on N.W.A’s “Dopeman” in 1987. Later on, he mastered that sound creating a whole sub-genre of hip-hop, G-funk, based on high-pitched synthesizer solos and sampling whole parts of one song to create another, creating a simple sound, rather than the dense sound of many samples in one song, then used by The Bomb Squad. The “G-funk” style dominated hip-hop from 1992 to 1996, through multi-platinum album releases such as Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic”, which contained the global hit “Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang”, that samples “I Wanna do Somethin’ Freaky to You” by Leon Haywood, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s “Doggystyle” and 2Pac’s “All Eyez on Me”. After 1996, Dr. Dre took a whole new direction away from sampling, moving to interpolating songs with the use of live instrumentation, and changing his sound to a much different style, which dominated his second multi-platinum album, 1999’s 2001.
Sampling has been an area of contention from a legal perspective. Early sampling artists simply used portions of other artists’ recordings, without permission; once rap and other music incorporating samples began to make significant money, the original artists began to take legal action, claiming copyright infringement. Some sampling artists fought back, claiming their samples were fair use (a legal doctrine in the USA that is not universal). International sampling is governed by agreements such as the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act.
Sampling existing (copyrighted) recordings using manipulation with tape recorders goes back at least as far as 1961, when James Tenney created Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”) from samples of Elvis Presley’s recording of the song “Blue Suede Shoes.” At the time, many artists such as Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs were experimenting with the new technology that was tape-recording by manipulating existing works such as radio broadcasts. Brion Gysin’s work tended to favor his permutation poems as the vehicle for cut-ups with spliced repetition of the same series of words rearranged in every conceivable pattern, frequently utilizing snippets of speeches or news broadcasts. Burroughs preferred a much more frantic and disorganized sound that would later spawn similar disjointed collage material from modern groups such as Negativland. Burroughs would record, for instance, a radio broadcast about military action, then dub parts of the broadcast likely at random often stuttering and distorting the original work far beyond comprehension.
However, before then, the 1956 novelty hit single “The Flying Saucer”, by Buchanan and Goodman, used segments of the original recordings of 18 different chart hits from 1955–56, intertwined with spoken “news” commentary in the style of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, to tell the story of a visit from a flying saucer. After the record was issued, an agreement was reached with music publishing houses for them to take a share of royalties from the records sold. Although his partnership with Buchanan soon ended, Dickie Goodman continued to make similar records through the 1960s and 1970s, one of his biggest hits being “Mr. Jaws” in 1975.
However, sampling did not truly take off in popular music until the early eighties when pioneering hip hop producers, such as Grandmaster Flash, started to produce rap records using sampled breaks rather than live studio bands, which had until then been the norm.
Conventional wisdom would hold that the first popular rap single to feature sampling was “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang on their own independent Sugar Hill Label in 1979. However, instead of ‘sampling’ the existing record “Good Times” by Chic, Sugar Hill employed a house band, called “Positive Force” to record a copy of “Good Times” which was then rapped over. Doug Wimbish and other session musicians were called upon to play live music on many classic Sugar Hill records. Those sounds are not samples but live musicians.
The 1981 album by David Byrne and Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, used sampling extensively for the songs’ vocals.
Usually taken from movies, television, or other non-musical media, spoken word samples are often used to create atmosphere, to set a mood, or even comic effect. The American composer Steve Reich used samples from interviews with Holocaust survivors as a source for the melodies on the 1988 album Different Trains, performed by the Kronos Quartet.
Many genres utilize sampling of spoken word to induce a mood, and Goa trance often employs samples of people speaking about the use of psychoactives, spirituality, or science fiction themes. Industrial is known for samples from horror/sci-fi movies, news broadcasts, propaganda reels, and speeches by political figures. The band Ministry frequently samples George W. Bush. Paul Hardcastle used recordings of a news reporter, as well as a soldier and ambient noise of a protest, in his single “Nineteen,” a song about Vietnam war veterans and Posttraumatic stress disorder. The band Negativland samples from practically every form of popular media, ranging from infomercials to children’s records. In the song “Civil War”, Guns N’ Roses samples from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, on the album Use Your Illusion II. Sludge band Dystopia make frequent use of samples, including news clips and recordings of junkies to create a bleak and nihilistic atmosphere. Other bands that frequently used samples in their work are noise rockers Steel Pole Bath Tub and death metal band Skinless. The american rapper and producer MF Doom frequently uses spoken word samples, taken from anything from old Spiderman and Fantastic Four cartoons to Charles Bukowski’s Dinosauria, We poem.
[edit]Unconventional sounds
These are not musical in the conventional sense Рthat is, neither percussive nor melodic Рbut which are musically useful for their interesting timbres or emotional associations, in the spirit of musique concr̬te. Some common examples include sirens and klaxons, locomotive whistles, natural sounds such as whale song, and cooing babies. It is common in theatrical sound design to use this type of sampling to store sound effects that can then be triggered from a musical keyboard or other software. This is very useful for high precision or nonlinear requirements.
[edit]See also
Amen Brother – one of the most sampled tracks of all time
http://www.divshare.com/download/3167790-6db
The Winstons were a 1960s funk and soul music group, based in Washington, D.C.. They are known for their 1969 recording of an EP featuring a song entitled “Color Him Father” on the A-side, and a song entitled “Amen, Brother” on the B-side. Half-way into “Amen, Brother”, there is a drum solo (performed by G.C. Coleman) which would cause The Winston’s EP to become one of the most widely-sampled record in the history of electronic music. Sampled audio clips of the drum solo became known as the Amen Break, which has been used in thousands of tracks in a large number of musical genres, including: hip-hop, [1] drum and bass, jungle, Big beat, Industrial, Electronica, and pop music.[2]
Scratching is a DJ or turntablist technique used to produce distinctive sounds by moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable while optionally manipulating the crossfader on a DJ mixer. While scratching is most commonly associated with hip hop music[citation needed], since the mid 1970s, it has been used in some styles of pop and nu metal. Within hip hop culture, scratching is one of the measures of a DJ’s skills[citation needed], and there are many scratching competitions. In recorded hip-hop songs, scratched hooks often use portions of different rap songs.
Scratching was developed by early hip hop DJs from New York such as Grand Wizard Theodore and DJ Grandmaster Flash, who describes scratching as, “nothing but the back-cueing that you hear in your ear before you push it [the recorded sound] out to the crowd.” (Toop, 1991).
*Although previous artists such as William S. Burroughs had experimented with the idea of manipulating a reel to reel tape manually for the sounds produced (such as with his 1950s recording, “Sound Piece”),vinyl scratching as an element of hip hop pioneered the idea of making the sound an integral and rhythmic part of music instead of uncontrolled noise.
Grandmaster Flash was the first person to release a song, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”, with scratching on it in 1981.Â
Most scratches are produced by moving a vinyl record back and forth with the hand while it is playing on a turntable. This creates a distinctive sound that has come to be one of the most recognizable features of hip hop music. Over time with excessive scratching the needle will cause what is referred to as record burn.
The basic equipment setup for scratching includes two turntables, and a DJ mixer, which is a mixer that has a crossfader and “cue” buttons to allow the DJ to “cue up” new music without the audience hearing.When scratching, this crossfader is utilized in conjunction with the “scratching hand” to cut in and out of the scratched record.
More rarely, DJs do scratching with magnetic tape, sometimes by recording music onto magnetic stripes and disassembling a cassette tape recorder to play the magnetic stripes.[citation needed] An example of tape-scratching can be viewed in this video of Mr. Tape, from Latvia
Sounds that are frequently scratched include but are not limited to drum beats, horn stabs, spoken word samples, and lines from other songs. Any sound recorded to vinyl can be used, and CD players providing a turntable-like interface allow DJs to scratch not only material that was never released on vinyl, but also field recordings and samples from television and movies that have been burned to CD-R. Some DJs and anonymous collectors release 12-inch singles called battle records that include trademark, novel or hard-to-find scratch fodder. The most recognizable samples used for scratching are the “Ahh” and “Fresh” samples, which originate from the song “Change the Beat” by Fab 5 Freddy.
LEGAL
One of the first major legal cases regarding sampling was with UK dance act M|A|R|R|S “Pump Up the Volume”. As the record reached the UK top ten, producers Stock Aitken Waterman obtained an injunction against the record due to the unauthorized use of a sample from their hit single “Roadblock”. The dispute was settled out of court, with the injunction being lifted in return for an undertaking that overseas releases would not contain the “Roadblock” sample, and the disc went on to top the UK singles chart. The sample in question had been so distorted as to be virtually unrecognizable, and SAW didn’t realize their record had been used until they heard co-producer Dave Dorrell mention it in a radio interview.
In 1987, The JAMs released 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) 1987 was produced using extensive unauthorised samples which plagiarised a wide range of musical works. They were ordered by the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society to destroy all unsold copies of the album because of the numerous uncleared samples, after a complaint from ABBA. In response, The JAMs disposed of many copies of 1987 in unorthodox, publicised ways. They also released a version of the album titled “1987 (The JAMs 45 Edits)”, stripped of all unauthorised samples to leave periods of protracted silence and so little audible content that it was formally classed as a 12-inch single.
2 Live Crew, , it was their 1989 album As Clean as They Wanna Be (a re-tooling of As Nasty As They Wanna Be) that began the prolonged legal debate over sampling. The album contained a track entitled “Pretty Woman,” based on the well-known Roy Orbison song Oh, Pretty Woman. 2 Live Crew’s version sampled the guitar, bass, and drums from the original, without permission. While the opening lines are the same, the two songs split ways immediately following.
For example:
Roy Orbison’s version – “Pretty woman, walking down the street/ Pretty woman, the kind I’d like to meet.”
2 Live Crew’s version – “Big hairy woman, all that hair ain’t legit,/ Cause you look like Cousin Itt.”[16]
In addition to this, while the music is identifiable as the Orbison song, there were changes implemented by the group. The new version contained interposed scraper notes, overlays of solos in different keys, and an altered drum beat.[16]
The group was sued by the song’s copyright owners Acuff-Rose. The company claimed that 2 Live Crew’s unauthorized use of the samples devalued the original, and was thus a case of copyright infringement. The group claimed they were protected under the fair use doctrine. The case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music came to the Supreme Court in 1994.
In reviewing the case, the Supreme Court didn’t consider previous ruling in which any commercial use (and economic gain) was considered copyright infringement. Instead they re-evaluated the original frame of copyright as set forth in the Constitution. The opinion that resulted from Emerson v. Davies played a major role in the decision.
“[In] truth, in literature, in science and in art, there are, and can be, few, if any, things, which in an abstract sense, are strictly new and original throughout. Every book in literature, science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used before.” Emerson v. Davies,8 F.Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845)[16]
Â
Perhaps what played a larger role was the result from the Folsom v. Marsh case:
“look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work.” Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342, 348 (No. 4,901) (CCD Mass. 1841)[16]
The court ruled that any financial gain 2 Live Crew received from their version did not infringe upon Acuff-Rose because the two songs were targeted at very different audiences. 2 Live Crew’s use of copyrighted material was protected under the fair use doctrine, as a parody, even though it was released commercially. While the appellate court had determined that the mere nature of the parody made it inherently unfair, the Supreme Court’s ruling reversed this decision, with Justice David Souter writing that the lower court was wrong in determining parody alone to be a sufficient criterion for copyright infringement.
Danger Mouse with the release of The Grey Album in 2004, which is a remix of The Beatles’ self-titled album and rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album has been embroiled in a similar situation with the record label EMI issuing cease and desist orders over uncleared Beatles samples.
Recently, a movement — started mainly by Lawrence Lessig — of free culture has prompted many audio works to be licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows for legal sampling of the work provided the resulting work(s) are licensed under the same terms.
Scratching is a DJ or turntablist technique used to produce distinctive sounds by moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable while optionally manipulating the crossfader on a DJ mixer. While scratching is most commonly associated with hip hop music [ citation needed ] , since the mid 1970s, it has been used in some styles of pop and nu metal . Within hip hop culture, scratching is one of the measures of a DJ’s skills [ citation needed ] , and there are many scratching competitions. In recorded hip-hop songs, scratched hooks often use portions of different rap songs.
Scratching was developed by early hip hop DJs from New York such as Grand Wizard Theodore and DJ Grandmaster Flash , who describes scratching as, “nothing but the back-cueing that you hear in your ear before you push it [the recorded sound] out to the crowd.” (Toop, 1991). Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc also influenced the early development of scratching. Kool Herc developed break-beat DJing , where the breaks of funk songs—being the most danceable part, often featuring percussion —were isolated and repeated for the purpose of all-night dance parties. [1]
Although previous artists such as William S. Burroughs had experimented with the idea of manipulating a reel to reel tape manually for the sounds produced (such as with his 1950s recording, “Sound Piece”),vinyl scratching as an element of hip hop pioneered the idea of making the sound an integral and rhythmic part of music instead of uncontrolled noise.
Christian Marclay was one of the earliest musicians to scratch outside of hip hop. In the mid-1970s, Marclay used gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages . He developed his turntable sounds independently of hip hop DJs. Although he is little-known to mainstream audiences, Marclay has been described as “the most influential turntable figure outside hip hop.” [2] and the “unwitting inventor of turntablism .” [3]
Grandmaster Flash was the first person to release a song, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel “, with scratching on it in 1981. In 1982, Malcolm McLaren & the World’s Famous Supreme Team released a single “Buffalo Gals “, juxtaposing extensive scratching with calls from square dancing , and, in 1983, the EP, D’ya Like Scratchin’? , which is entirely focused on scratching. The Streetsounds Electro compilation albums & Herbie Hancocks – Rockit . Also introduced scratching to a Uk & European audience in 1983.
[edit ]
Basic techniques
[edit ]
Vinyl recordings
Most scratches are produced by moving a vinyl record back and forth with the hand while it is playing on a turntable . This creates a distinctive sound that has come to be one of the most recognizable features of hip hop music. [ citation needed ] Over time with excessive scratching the needle will cause what is referred to as record burn. [ citation needed ]
The basic equipment setup for scratching includes two turntables, and a DJ mixer, which is a mixer that has a crossfader and “cue” buttons to allow the DJ to “cue up” new music without the audience hearing. [ citation needed ] When scratching, this crossfader is utilized in conjunction with the “scratching hand” to cut in and out of the scratched record. [ citation needed ]
[edit ]
Non-vinyl scratching
▪ CDJs , devices that allow a DJ to manipulate a CD as if it were a vinyl record, have become widely available.
▪ Vinyl emulation software allows a DJ to manipulate the playback of digital music files on a computer using the turntables as an interface. This allows DJs to scratch, beatmatch , and perform other turntablist maneuvers that would be impossible with a conventional keyboard-and-mouse. Scratch software includes Traktor Scratch Pro , Final Scratch , Mixxx , Serato Scratch Live , Virtual DJ , M-Audio Torq, algoriddim djay , and Digital Scratch .
▪ More rarely, DJs do scratching with magnetic tape, sometimes by recording music onto magnetic stripes and disassembling a cassette tape recorder to play the magnetic stripes. [ citation needed ] An example of tape-scratching can be viewed in this video of Mr. Tape, from Latvia
[edit ]
Sounds
Sounds that are frequently scratched include but are not limited to drum beats, horn stabs , spoken word samples , and lines from other songs. Any sound recorded to vinyl can be used, and CD players providing a turntable-like interface allow DJs to scratch not only material that was never released on vinyl, but also field recordings and samples from television and movies that have been burned to CD-R . Some DJs and anonymous collectors release 12-inch singles called battle records that include trademark, novel or hard-to-find scratch fodder. The most recognizable samples used for scratching are the “Ahh” and “Fresh” samples, which originate from the song “Change the Beat” by Fab 5 Freddy.
There are many scratching techniques, which differ in how the movements of the record is combined with opening and closing the crossfader (or another fader or switch, where “open” means that the signal is audible, and “closed” means that the signal is inaudible). This terminology is not unique; the following discussion, however, is consistent with the terminology used by DJ Q-Bert on his Do It Yourself Scratching DVD.
[edit ]
Sophisticated techniques
▪ Baby scratch – The simplest scratch form, it is performed with the scratching hand only, moving the record back and forth in continuous movements while the crossfader is in the open position.
▪ Forward and backward scratch – The forward scratch, also referred to as “cutting”, is a baby scratch where the crossfader is closed during the backwards movement of the record. If the record is let go instead of being pushed forward it is also called “release scratch”. Cutting out the forward part of the record movement instead of the backward part gives a “backward scratch”.
▪ Tear Scratch – Tear scratches are scratches where the record is moved in a staggered fashion, dividing the forward and backward movement into two or more movements. This allows creating sounds similar to “flare scratches” without use of the crossfader and it allows for more complex rhythmic patterns. The term can also refer to a simpler, slower version of the chirp.
▪ Scribble scratch – The scribble scratch is performed without the crossfader, and is performed by tensing the forearm muscles of the scratching hand and rapidly jiggling the record back and forth.
▪ Chirp scratch – The chirp scratch involves closing the fader just after playing the start of a sound .. and as you shut the sound off you should also stop the record moving at that point too , then reverse manouvre the record while opening the fader to get a kinda ” chir-pa ” pattern simply from one baby scratch and a cut in the centre . When performed using a recording of drums this allows creating the illusion of doubled scratching speed, due to the attack created by cutting in the crossfader on the backward movement.
▪ Hydrophonic Scratch – is a baby scratch with a “tear scratch” sound produced by your thumb running the opposite direction as your scratch fingers. This rubbing of the thumb adds a vibrating effect or reverberation to forward movements on the turntable.
▪ Transformer scratch – with the crossfader closed, the record is moved with the scratching hand while periodically “tapping” the crossfader open and immediately closing it again.
▪ Flare scratch – it begins with the crossfader open, and then the record is moved while briefly closing the fader one or more times to cut the sound out. This produces a staggering sound which can make a single “flare” sound like a very fast series of “chirps” or “tears.” The number of times the fader is closed (“clicks”) during the record’s movement is usually used as a prefix to distinguish the variations. The flare allows a DJ to scratch continuously with less hand fatigue than transforming. The flare can be combined with the crab for an extremely rapid continuous series of scratches.
▪ Crab scratch – it consists of moving the record while quickly tapping the crossfader open with each finger of the crossfader hand. In this way, DJs are able to perform transforms or flares much faster than they could by manipulating the crossfader with the whole hand. It produces a fading/increasing transforming sound.
▪ Twiddle scratch – consists of a two finger Crab Scratch using your index and middle fingers
▪ Orbit scratch – this term describes any scratch (most commonly flares) that are repeated during the forward and backward movement of the record. Orbit is also used as a shorthand for 2-click flares.
▪ Tweak scratch – it is performed with the turntable’s motor off. The record platter is set in motion manually, then “tweaked” faster and slower to create a songlike scratch. This scratch form is best performed with long, sustained sounds.
▪ Euro scratch – a variation of the “flare scratch” in which two faders are used simultaneously with one hand to cut the sound much faster. The euro scratch can also be done by using only the up fader and the phono line switch to cut the sound.
[edit ]
Scratching culture
While scratching is becoming more and more popular within pop music, sophisticated scratching is still predominantly an underground style. The Invisibl Skratch Piklz from San Francisco focuses on scratching. In 1994, the group was formed by DJs Q-Bert , Disk & Shortkut and later Mix Master Mike . In July 2000, San Francisco ’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts held Skratchcon2000, the first DJ Skratch forum that provided “the education and development of skratch music literacy”. In 2001,Thud Rumble became an independent company that works with DJ artists to produce and distribute scratch records.
In 2004, Scratch Magazine , one of the first publications about hip-hop DJs and producers, released its debut issue, following in the footsteps of the lesser-known Tablist magazine. Pedestrian is a UK arts organisation that runs Urban Music Mentors workshops for youth in which DJs tell youth how to create beats, use turntables, MC, and perform.
[edit ]
Use outside of hip hop
Scratching has been incorporated into a number of other musical genres, including pop , rock , jazz , heavy metal and classical music performances. For recording use, samplers are often used instead of physically scratching a vinyl record. Rage Against the Machine (and former Audioslave ) guitarist Tom Morello performs scratching-inspired guitar solos . In the song “Bulls on Parade “, and many other songs in which he solos, he creates scratch-like rhythmic sounds by rubbing the strings over the pick-ups while using the pick-up selector switch as a cross-fader.
Since the 1990s, scratching has begun being used in a variety of popular music genres, such as nu metal acts (like Linkin Park , Slipknot and Limp Bizkit ) and in some types of pop music (e.g. Nelly Furtado ), and in some types of alternative rock (e.g. Incubus ).. Scratching is also popular in various electronic music styles, most particularly in hard-groove techno.
[edit ]
See also
[edit ]
Sources
▪ Allmusic’s Grand Wizard Theodore biography [dead link ] (also at Artist Direct )
▪ DJ Grandmaster Flash quoted in Toop, David (1991). Rap Attack 2 , 65. New York: Serpent’s Tail. ISBN 1-85242-243-2 .
[edit ]
References
1. ^ http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p312125/biography
3. ^ allmusic ((( More Encores: Christian Marclay Plays With the Records Of… > Overview )))
[edit ]
External links
▪
▪ ▪ Scratching at the DJ Techniques wiki
▪ ‘A comprehensive Guide To Turntablism – 10.000+ words on turntablism!’
▪ Turntablism: Beat Juggling and Scratching Videos
Remix
From Collage to Mashup/Remix
A collage (From the French : coller , to glue, French pronunciation: [kɔ.laːʒ] ) is a work of formal art , primarily in the visual arts , made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.
The term collage derives from the French “colle” meaning “glue “. [1] This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art . [2]
The glued-on patches which Braque and Picasso added to their canvases offered a new perspective on painting when the patches “collided with the surface plane of the painting.” [5] In this perspective, collage was part of a methodical reexamination of the relation between painting and sculpture, and these new works “gave each medium some of the characteristics of the other,” according to the Guggenheim essay. Furthermore, these chopped-up bits of newspaper introduced fragments of externally referenced meaning into the collision: “References to current events, such as the war in the Balkans, and to popular culture enriched the content of their art.” This juxtaposition of signifiers, “at once serious and tongue-in-cheek,” was fundamental to the inspiration behind collage: “Emphasizing concept and process over end product, collage has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary.” [5]
Digital collage is the technique of using computer tools in collage creation to encourage chance associations of disparate visual elements and the subsequent transformation of the visual results through the use of electronic media . It is commonly used in the creation of digital art .
Main article: Sound collage
The concept of collage has crossed the boundaries of visual arts. In music , with the advances on recording technology, avant-garde artists started experimenting with cutting and pasting since the middle of the twentieth century.
In the 1960s, George Martin created collages of recordings while producing the records of The Beatles . In 1967 Pop artist Peter Blake made the collage for the cover of the Beatles seminal album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . In the 1970s and ’80s, the likes of Christian Marclay and the group Negativland reappropriated old audio in new ways. By the 1990s and 2000s, with the popularity of the sampler , it became apparent that “musical collages ” had become the norm for popular music , especially in rap , hip-hop and electronic music . [14] In 1996, DJ Shadow released the groundbreaking album, Endtroducing….. , made entirely of preexisting recorded material mixed together in audible collage. In the same year, New York City based artist, writer, and musician, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky ‘s work pushed the work of sampling into a museum and gallery context as an art practice that combined DJ culture’s obsession with archival materials as sound sources on his album “Songs of a Dead Dreamer” and in his books “Rhythm Science ” (2004) and “Sound Unbound (2008)” (MIT Press). In his books, “mash-up” and collage based mixes of authors, artists, and musicians such as Antonin Artaud , James Joyce , William S. Burroughs , and Raymond Scott were featured as part of a what he called “literature of sound.” In 2000, The Avalanches released Since I Left You , a musical collage consisting of approximately 3,500 musical sources (i.e., samples). [15]
Legal issues
When collage uses existing works, the result is what some copyright scholars call a derivative work . The collage thus has a copyright separate from any copyrights pertaining to the original incorporated works.
Due to redefined and reinterpreted copyright laws, and increased financial interests, some forms of collage art are significantly restricted. For example, in the area of sound collage (such as hip hop music ), some court rulings effectively have eliminated the de minimis doctrine as a defense to copyright infringement , thus shifting collage practice away from non-permissive uses relying on fair use or de minimis protections, and toward licensing . [20] Examples of musical collage art that have run afoul of modern copyright are The Grey Album and Negativland ‘s U2 .
The copyright status of visual works is less troubled, although still ambiguous. For instance, some visual collage artists have argued that the first-sale doctrine protects their work. The first-sale doctrine prevents copyright holders from controlling consumptive uses after the “first sale” of their work, although the Ninth Circuit has held that the first-sale doctrine does not apply to derivative works . [21] The de minimis doctrine and the fair use exception also provide important defenses against claimed copyright infringement. [22] The Second Circuit in October, 2006, held that artist Jeff Koons was not liable for copyright infringement because his incorporation of a photograph into a collage painting was fair use. [23]
▪
▪ Exhibition of traditional and digital collage by many artists – curated by Jonathan Talbot in 2001
▪
▪
▪ collageart.org , A website dedicated to the art of collage
▪ Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and Alfred Hitchcock, the 3 Albums , “recomposed photographs”, in a rather surrealist spirit
▪
▪ ▪ Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Edited by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Foreword by Cory Doctorow . Introduction by Steve Reich
▪
▪ ▪ Rhythm Science The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as DJ Spooky delivers a manifesto for rhythm science—the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, “the changing same.”
CutUp
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing.
A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Collage , which was popularized roughly contemporaneously with the Surrealist movement, sometimes incorporated texts such as newspapers or brochures. Prior to this event, the technique had been published in an issue of 391 with in the poem by Tzara, dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love under the sub-title, TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM [1]
Freud’s secondary elaboration bomb
Also in the 1950s, painter and writer Brion Gysin more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally re-discovering it. He had placed layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade . Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions of text and image. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. The book Minutes to Go resulted from his initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerged as coherent and meaningful prose. South African poet Sinclair Beiles also used this technique and co-authored Minutes To Go .
Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel . The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material’s implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text.
Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” [2]
In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind , a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form. Jeff Nuttall’s publications “My Own Mag “, was another important outlet for the then-radical technique.
And on to remix and mashups….
Aphorisms
Nietzsche
Quotes
|
Shields
Yoga Sutras
Interpretations
Translations
The ideas are often interpreted/concretized/mediated … Moses mediating the word of God
Appropriation
Lessig
Quotes
A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.
As we’ve seen, our constitutional system requires limits on copyright as a way to assure that copyright holders do not too heavily influence the development and distribution of our culture.
Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.
If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they’re free for people to build upon as they see fit.
If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.
Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we’ve seen – the Internet – has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don’t get in the way of this ideology.
Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.
Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.
The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.
We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.
While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.
Shields
Derivative
Transformativeness is a concept used in United States copyright law to describe a characteristic of some derivative works that makes them transcend or place in a new light the underlying works on which they are based. In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, which would otherwise remain unavailable. Such transformativeness weighs heavily in a fair use analysis and may excuse what seems a clear copyright infringement from liability.
Campbell
Transformativeness is a crucial factor in current legal analysis of derivative works largely as a result of the Supreme Court’s 1994 decision in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. The Court’s opinion emphasized the importance of transformativeness in its fair use analysis of the accused infringers’ parody of “ Oh, Pretty Woman ,” which the case involved. In parody, as the Court explained, the transformativeness is the new insight that readers, listeners, or viewers gain from the parodic treatment of the original work. As the Court pointed out, the words of the parody “derisively demonstrat[e] how bland and banal the Orbison [Pretty Woman] song” is.
Leval article
The modern emphasis of transformativeness in fair use analysis stems from a 1990 article by Judge Pierre N. Leval in the Harvard Law Review, Toward a Fair Use Standard , [1] which the Supreme Court quoted and cited extensively in its Campbell opinion. In his article, Judge Leval explained the social importance of transformative use of another’s work and what justifies such a taking:
I believe the answer to the question of justification turns primarily on whether, and to what extent, the challenged use is transformative. The use must be productive and must employ the quoted matter in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original. …[If] the secondary use adds value to the original—if the quoted matter is used as raw material, transformed in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings—this is the very type of activity that the fair use doctrine intends to protect for the enrichment of society.
Transformative uses may include criticizing the quoted work, exposing the character of the original author, proving a fact, or summarizing an idea argued in the original in order to defend or rebut it. They also may include parody, symbolism, aesthetic declarations, and innumerable other uses.
Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. , a parody of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa , and also known as the Mona Lisa With a Moustache , is an example of a highly transformative work that accomplishes its transformative effect with what seems to be a minimum of added material. L.H.O.O.Q. has been described as the most famous derivative work in the world, [2] perhaps because of its widespread use for pedagogic purposes.
Marcel Duchamp created the work by adding, among other things, a moustache, goatee, and the caption “L.H.O.O.Q.” (meaning “she has a hot tail” [3] ) to Leonardo’s iconic work. These few, seemingly insubstantial additions were highly transformative because they incensed contemporary French bourgeoisie, [4] by mocking their cult of “Jocondisme,” [5] at that time said to be “practically a secular religion of the French bourgeoisie and an important part of their self image.” Duchamp’s defacement of their icon was considered “a major stroke of epater le bourgeois .” Thus, it has been said that the “transformation of a cult icon into an object of ridicule by adding a small quantum of additional material can readily be deemed preparation of a derivative work.” [6]
A parodic derivative work based on Duchamp’s parodic derivative work is shown at this link to an animated gif . This kind of parodic work could not have existed before the development of modern technology.
Arriba Soft and Perfect 10
The concept, as Judge Level and the Campbell Court described it, developed in relation to fair use of traditional works: literary works, musical works, and pictorial works. But recently courts have extended this rationale to Internet and computer-related works. In such cases, as illustrated by Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation [7] and Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. , [8] the courts find a derivative-work use (such as that of thumbnails in an image search engine, for indexing purposes) transformative because it provides an added benefit to the public, which was not previously available and might remain unavailable without the derivative or secondary use. The Ninth Circuit explained this in the Perfect 10 case:
Google’s use of thumbnails is highly transformative. In Kelly we concluded that Arriba’s use of thumbnails was transformative because “Arriba’s use of the images served a different function than Kelly’s use—improving access to information on the Internet versus artistic expression.” Although an image may have been created originally to serve an entertainment, aesthetic, or informative function, a search engine transforms the image into a pointer directing a user to a source of information. Just as a “parody has an obvious claim to transformative value” because “it can provide social benefit, by shedding light on an earlier work, and, in the process, creating a new one,” a search engine provides social benefit by incorporating an original work into a new work, namely, an electronic reference tool. Indeed, a search engine may be more transformative than a parody because a search engine provides an entirely new use for the original work, while a parody typically has the same entertainment purpose as the original work.
…In conducting our case-specific analysis of fair use in light of the purposes of copyright, we must weigh Google’s superseding and commercial uses of thumbnail images against Google’s significant transformative use, as well as the extent to which Google’s search engine promotes the purposes of copyright and serves the interests of the public. Although the district court acknowledged the “truism that search engines such as Google Image Search provide great value to the public,” the district court did not expressly consider whether this value outweighed the significance of Google’s superseding use or the commercial nature of Google’s use. The Supreme Court, however, has directed us to be mindful of the extent to which a use promotes the purposes of copyright and serves the interests of the public.
…We conclude that the significantly transformative nature of Google’s search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google’s superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case. … We are also mindful of the Supreme Court’s direction that “the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use.”
The Ninth Circuit’s treatment of transformativeness and fair use in the Arriba Soft and Perfect 10 cases illustrates different data points on the copyright infringement spectrum, at least with respect to transformativeness and fair use. Arriba Soft was a relatively polar case. The harm to Kelly, the copyright owner, was negligible; it was hardly more than his hurt feelings. [9] Thus, the Ninth Circuit said in its opinion that “Arriba’s creation and use of the thumbnails [the derivative work] does not harm the market for or value of Kelly’s images.” On the other hand, the court found that Arriba’s use benefited the public: “Arriba’s use of the images serves a different function than Kelly’ s use—improving access to information on the internet versus artistic expression.” The balance thus tilted strongly in Arriba’s favor. This led the Ninth Circuit to be the first court to make the equation highly beneficial to public = transformative , and as the Supreme Court explained in Campbell , the more transformative a derivative use the more likely the use is to be a fair use.
The Campbell Court recognized that the balance may not always be one-sided, as it was in Campbell itself and in Arriba Soft . In the Perfect 10 case the interests were more evenly balanced, for the first time in a derivative work case involving new information technology. Both Google and Perfect 10 seemed to have legitimate interests at stake and support for their respective positions. Thus, there was a finding that “Google’s wide-ranging use of thumbnails is highly transformative: their creation and display is designed to, and does, display visual search results quickly and efficiently to users of Google Image Search.” But Google’s use had some commercial aspects and was claimed to impair P10’s commercial interests. Yet, on balance the Ninth Circuit found that the transformativeness outweighed the other fair use factors because “Google has provided a significant benefit to the public” in facilitating image searches by means of thumbnail images.
Pop-ups
The use of pop-up advertising , in which third-party advertisements pop up on a competitor’s Web page and change its appearance to create a derivative work, may present more difficult transformativeness issues. On the one hand, the pop-ups provide the public with additional information about making buying decisions (particularly in the form of price comparisons). [10] On the other hand, they adversely affect the Web page proprietor’s interest in the integrity of its Web page and its investment interest in creating and maintaining the page. No court has yet addressed derivative work copyright considerations in terms of how to strike a balance between the competing interests at stake, here, although several courts have found no copyright infringement liability for one reason or another. [11][12]
An example of promotional advertising for a pop-up company (Gator), illustrating various pop-up techniques for changing the appearance of another firm’s Web page is shown in this Flash animation . For an argument supporting the claim that uses such as that of Half.com are transformative, see this When-U promo stored on the Wayback Machine . When-U’s argument is based on the financial benefit to consumers when they are steered to cheaper sources for goods and services that they desire.
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Photos of sculptures
On February 25, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled 2-1 that sculptor Frank Gaylord, architect of the Korean War Veterans Memorial , was entitled to compensation when an image of the memorial was used on a 37 cent postage stamp , because he had not signed away his intellectual property rights to the sculpture when it was erected. The appeals court rejected arguments that the photo was transformative. [13]
In 2002 amateur photographer and retired Marine John All was paid $1,500 to use a photograph of his of the memorial on a snowy day for the stamp. [14] More than $17 million worth of the stamps were sold. In 2006, Gaylord enlisted Fish & Richardson to make a pro bono claim that the Postal Service had violated his Intellectual property rights to the sculpture and he should be compensated. The Postal Service argued that Gaylord was not the sole sculptor (saying he had received advice from federal sources—who recommended that the uniforms appear more in the wind) and also that the sculpture was actually architecture . Gaylord won all of his arguments in the lower court except for one—the court ruled that the photo was fair use and thus Gaylord was not entitled to compensation. Gaylord appealed and won. The case can now either be appealed to the United States Supreme Court or be damages can be assessed by the lower court. [13]
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Books
Examples
Nabokov
Pale Fire
Pale Fire (1962) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov . The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled “Pale Fire”, written by the fictional John Shade , with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are central characters. Pale Fire has spawned a wide variety of interpretations and a large body of written criticism, which Pekka Tammi estimated in 1995 as over 80 studies. [1] The Nabokov authority Brian Boyd has called it “Nabokov’s most perfect novel”. [2]
Plot introduction
Starting with the table of contents, Pale Fire looks like the publication of a 999-line poem in four cantos (“Pale Fire”) by the fictional John Shade with a Foreword, extensive Commentary, and Index by his self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote . Kinbote’s Commentary takes the form of notes to various numbered lines of the poem. Here and in the rest of his critical apparatus , Kinbote explicates the poem surprisingly little. Focusing instead on his own concerns, he divulges what proves to be the plot piece by piece, some of which can be connected by following the many cross-references. Espen Aarseth noted that Pale Fire “can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem.” [3] Thus although the narration is non-linear and multidimensional, the reader can still choose to read the novel in a linear manner without risking misinterpretation.
The novel’s unusual structure has attracted much attention, and it is often cited as an important example of metafiction ; [4][5][6] it has also been called a poioumenon . [7] The connection between Pale Fire and hypertext was stated soon after its publication; in 1969, the information-technology researcher Ted Nelson obtained permission from the novel’s publishers to use it for a hypertext demonstration at Brown University . [8]
The interaction between Kinbote and Shade takes place in the fictitious small college town of New Wye, Appalachia, where they live across a lane from each other, from February to July, 1959. Kinbote writes his commentary from then to October, 1959, in a tourist cabin in the equally fictitious western town of Cedarn, Utana. Both authors recount many earlier events, Shade mostly in New Wye and Kinbote in New Wye and in Europe , especially the “distant northern land” of Zembla.
Shade’s poem digressively describes many aspects of his life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural. Canto 2 is about his family and the apparent suicide of his daughter, Hazel. Canto 3 focuses on Shade’s search for knowledge about an afterlife, culminating in a “faint hope” in higher powers “playing a game of worlds” as indicated by apparent coincidences. Canto 4 offers details on Shade’s daily life and creative process, as well as thoughts on his poetry, which he finds to be a means of somehow understanding the universe.
In Kinbote’s editorial contributions he tells three stories intermixed with each other. One is his own story, notably including what he thinks of as his friendship with Shade. After Shade was murdered, Kinbote acquired the manuscript, including some variants, and has taken it upon himself to oversee the poem’s publication, telling readers that it lacks only line 1000. Kinbote’s second story deals with King Charles II, “The Beloved,” the deposed king of Zembla. King Charles escaped imprisonment by Soviet -backed revolutionaries, making use of a secret passage and brave adherents in disguise. Kinbote repeatedly claims that he inspired Shade to write the poem by recounting King Charles’s escape to him and that possible allusions to the king, and to Zembla, appear in Shade’s poem, especially in rejected drafts. However, no explicit reference to King Charles is to be found in the poem. Kinbote’s third story is that of Gradus, an assassin dispatched by the new rulers of Zembla to kill the exiled King Charles. Gradus makes his way from Zembla through Europe and America to New Wye, suffering comic mishaps. In the last note, to the missing line 1000, Kinbote narrates how Gradus killed Shade by mistake.
The reader soon realizes that Kinbote is King Charles, living incognito—or, though Kinbote builds an elaborate picture of Zembla complete with samples of a constructed language , that he is insane and that his identification with King Charles is a delusion, as perhaps all of Zembla is.
Nabokov said in an interview that Kinbote committed suicide after finishing the book. [9] The critic Michael Wood has stated, “This is authorial trespassing, and we don’t have to pay attention to it,” [10] but Brian Boyd has argued that internal evidence points to Kinbote’s suicide. [11] One of Kinbote’s annotations to Shade’s poem (corresponding to line 493) addresses the subject of suicide at some length.
Interpretations
Some readers concentrate on the apparent story, focusing on traditional aspects of fiction such as the relationship among the characters. [26][27] In 1997, Brian Boyd published a much-discussed study [28] arguing that the ghost of John Shade influenced Kinbote’s contributions. He expanded this essay into a book in which he also argues that, in order to trigger Shade’s poem, Hazel’s ghost induced Kinbote to recount his Zemblan delusions to Shade. [29]
Some readers, starting with Mary McCarthy [15] and including Boyd, Nabokov’s annotator Alfred Appel, [30] and D. Barton Johnson, [31] see Charles Kinbote as an alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, stating in an interview in 1962 (the novel’s year of publication) that Pale Fire “is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman.” [12] The novel’s intricate structure of teasing cross-references leads readers to this “plum”. The Index, supposedly created by Kinbote, features an entry for a “Botkin, V.,” describing this Botkin as an “American scholar of Russian descent”—and referring to a note in the Commentary on line 894 of Shade’s poem, in which no such person is directly mentioned but a character suggests that “Kinbote” is “a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine”. In this interpretation, “Gradus” the murderer is an American named Jack Grey who wanted to kill Judge Goldsworth, whose house “Pale Fire’s” commentator—whatever his “true” name is—is renting. Goldsworth had condemned Grey to an asylum from which he escaped shortly before mistakenly killing Shade, who resembled Goldsworth.
Other readers see a story quite different from the apparent narrative. “Shadeans” maintain that John Shade wrote not only the poem, but the commentary as well, having invented his own death and the character of Kinbote as a literary device. According to Boyd, [28] Andrew Field invented the Shadean theory [32] and Julia Bader expanded it; [33] Boyd himself espoused the theory for a time. [34] In an alternative version of the Shadean theory, Tiffany DeRewal and Matthew Roth argued that Kinbote is not a separate person but is a dissociated, alternative personality of John Shade. [35] (An early reviewer had mentioned that “a case might be made” for such a reading.) [36] “Kinboteans”, a decidedly smaller group, believe that Kinbote invented the existence of John Shade. Boyd [28] credits the Kinbotean theory to Page Stegner [37] and adds that most of its adherents are newcomers to the book. Some readers see the book as oscillating undecidably between these alternatives, like the Rubin vase (a drawing that may be two profiles or a goblet). [38][39][40]
Though a minority of commentators believe or at least accept the possibility that Zembla is as “real” as New Wye, [1] most assume that Zembla, or at least the operetta-quaint and homosexually gratified palace life enjoyed by Charles Xavier before he is overthrown, is imaginary in the context of the story. The name “Zembla” (taken from “Nova Zembla”, a former latinization of Novaya Zemlya ) [41] may evoke popular fantasy literature about royalty such as The Prisoner of Zenda , [22][42] signaling that it is not to be taken literally. [ citation needed ] As in other Nabokov books, however, the fiction is an exaggerated or comically distorted version of his own life [ citation needed ] as a son of privilege before the Russian Revolution and an exile afterwards, [43] and the central murder has resemblances (emphasized by Priscilla Meyer [44] ) to Nabokov’s father ‘s murder by an assassin who was trying to kill someone else.
Still other readers de-emphasize any sort of “real story” and may doubt the existence of such a thing. In the interplay of allusions and thematic links, they find a multifaceted image of English literature, [44] criticism, [38] or glimpses of a higher world and an afterlife. [45]
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Quotes
(Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.)
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
I confess, I do not believe in time.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
It’s a pity one can’t imagine what one can’t compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
There is only one school of literature – that of talent.
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Burroughs
Third Mind
The Third Mind is a book by Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs and artist/poet/novelist Brion Gysin . First published in a French-language edition in 1977, it was first published in English in 1978.
The Third Mind is a combination literary essay and writing collection showcasing a form of writing popularized by Burroughs and Gysin in the 1960s called “cut-ups “. Cut-ups involves taking (usually) unrelated texts, literally cutting the pages up, and then combining and rearranging the pieces to form new narratives and often-surreal images. This form of writing can also be adapted for filmmaking, as demonstrated by Burroughs and director Antony Balch in their early 1960s short film, The Cut-Ups .
The book contains numerous short fiction pieces demonstrating or related to the cut up method. Also included is poetry by Gysin and an interview with Burroughs. Some chapters had previously been published in various literary journals between 1960 and 1973.
The Third Mind (as a concept) The significance of “The Third Mind” is that it is a shared consciousness that can only be reached by two (or more) people together– they access a place that neither could reach alone. Person A and Person B can find new ideas in dialogue because they are improvisationally responding to each other’s unpredictable mind. Burroughs was trying to access this unpredictability by cutting and rearranging texts into nonsensical riddles. By weaving the nonsense into a linear narrative, he forced himself into dialogue with an unpredictable “other”. This practice builds on the classic Zen koan– a riddle designed to transcend the “rational” mind and lead a student to satori (enlightenment).
Borges
Bookslut.com has posted a long interview with White. It’s all worthwhile, but if you’re in a hurry, here’s a great bit from the conversation.
EW: Nabokov was quite a clown. He pretended to be Borges, and he pretended to be all these things…
Q: How do you pretend to be Borges?
EW: He put on a poncho and blind glasses.
http://www.jewcy.com/arts-and-culture/borges_and_jews
Quotes
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
In general, every country has the language it deserves.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Life itself is a quotation.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
Garden
This is the basic structure of elaborations, while Pale Fire provides the themes.
“The Garden of Forking Paths ” It was the first of Borges’s works to be translated into English when it appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in August 1948.
According to Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort , “The concept Borges described in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’—in several layers of the story, but most directly in the combination book and maze of Ts’ui Pên—is that of a novel that can be read in multiple ways, a hypertext novel. Borges described this in 1941, prior to the invention (or at least the public disclosure) of the electromagnetic digital computer. Not only did he arguably invent the hypertext novel—Borges went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.” [1] Borges’s vision of “forking paths” has been cited as inspiration by numerous new media scholars, in particular within the field of hypertext fiction. [2][3]
Plot summary
The story takes the form of a signed statement by a Chinese professor of English named Dr. Yu Tsun who is living in the United Kingdom during World War I . Tsun is a spy for the German Empire . He has also realized that the MI5 agent pursuing him, Captain Richard Madden, has entered the apartment of his handler Viktor Runeberg and has either captured or killed him. Dr. Tsun is certain that his own arrest is next. He has just discovered the location of a new British artillery park and wishes to convey that knowledge to his German handlers before he is captured. He at last hits upon a desperate plan in order to achieve this.
Dr. Tsun explains that his spying has never been for the sake of Imperial Germany, which he considers “a barbarous country.” Rather, he says, he did it because he wanted to prove to his racist masters that an Asian is intelligent enough to obtain the information needed to save their soldiers’ lives. Tsun suspects that Capt. Madden, an Irishman in the employ of the British Empire , might be similarly motivated.
Taking his few possessions, Tsun boards a train to the village of Ashgrove. Narrowly avoiding the pursuing Capt. Madden at the train station, he goes to the house of Dr. Stephen Albert, an eminent Sinologist . As he walks up the road to Dr. Albert’s house, Tsun reflects on his great ancestor, Ts’ui Pên, a learnèd and famous man who renounced his job as governor of Yunnan in order to undertake two tasks: to write a vast and intricate novel, and to construct an equally vast and intricate labyrinth , one “in which all men would lose their way.” Ts’ui Pên was murdered before completing his novel, however, and what he did write was a “contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts” that made no sense to subsequent readers; nor was the labyrinth ever found.
Dr. Tsun arrives at the house of Dr. Albert, who is deeply excited to have met a descendant of Ts’ui Pên. Dr. Albert reveals that he has himself been engaged in a longtime study of Ts’ui Pên’s novel. Albert explains excitedly that at one stroke he has solved both mysteries—the chaotic and jumbled nature of Ts’ui Pên’s unfinished book and the mystery of his lost labyrinth. Albert’s solution is that they are one and the same: the book is the labyrinth.
Basing his work on the strange legend that Ts’ui Pên had intended to construct an infinite labyrinth, as well as a cryptic letter from Ts’ui Pên himself stating, “I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths”. Dr. Albert realized that the “garden of forking paths” was the novel, and that the forking took place in time, not in space. As compared to most fictions, where the character chooses one alternative at each decision point and thereby eliminates all the others, Ts’ui Pên’s novel attempted to describe a world where all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously, each one itself leading to further proliferations of possibilities. Albert further explains that these constantly diverging paths do sometimes converge again, though as the result of a different chain of causes; for example, he says, in one possible time-line Dr. Tsun has come to his house as an enemy, in another as a friend.
Though trembling with gratitude at Albert’s revelation and in awe of his ancestor’s literary genius, Tsun glances up the path to see Capt. Madden approaching the house. He asks Albert to see Ts’ui Pên’s letter again. Dr. Albert turns to retrieve it, Tsun draws a revolver , and murders him in cold blood.
Dr. Tsun is arrested, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death by hanging . However, he has, “most abhorrently triumphed,” as he has revealed to Berlin the location of the artillery park. Indeed the park is bombed as Tsun goes on trial. The location of the artillery park was in Albert . Dr. Tsun had realized that the only way to convey that information was to murder a person of that name, so that the news of the murder would appear in British newspapers connected with his name.
Borges conceives of “a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression”, asking the reader to “become aware of all the possible choices we might make.” [4] The elaborate hypertext is much like the book which Borges suggests to be the labyrinth, (“Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing…the confusion of the novel suggested to me that it was the maze” [1] ) in a sense of how the site offers different approaches to how you may interpret the information provided, yet you’re not trapped in the dilemma of choosing one and eliminating others; you may choose to unfold all possibilities. You “create , in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork” (Wardrip-Fruin, 33).
Other stories by Borges that express the idea of infinite texts include “The Library of Babel ” and “The Book of Sand “. [1]
In 1987 Stuart Moulthrop created a hypertextual version of the “The Garden of Forking Paths”. This name was given to relate the Gulf War setting of his novel and Borges: Victory Garden . This work would never be published but is highly discussed in academic literature. [1]
Some modern reflexes of the Borgesian hypertext format include:
▪ The Choose Your Own Adventure genre, which allows the reader to make decisions that affect the outcome of the story.
▪ Hopscotch , a 1963 “hypertext novel (in codex form)” [1] by Argentine author Julio Cortázar .
▪ Soft Cinema by Lev Manovich , a form of non-linear media that demonstrates flexibility within narrative forms, whereby movies are created through algorithm software that determines the ordering of film fragments, and for which there is no final, intended product.
▪ Forward Anywhere , another form of non-linear narrative by Malloy and Marshall.
▪ Jodi , a puzzling hypertext project which reflects upon Borges’ idea of this attribute of complexity linking the novel to the labyrinth.
▪
Hypertext
Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature , characterized by the use of hypertext links which provide a new context for non-linearity in “literature” and reader interaction. [1] The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction .
The term can also be used to describe traditionally-published books in which a nonlinear narrative and interactive narrative is achieved through internal references. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Enrique Jardiel Poncela ‘s La Tournée de Dios (1932), Jorge Luis Borges ‘ The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Vladimir Nabokov ‘s Pale Fire (1962) and Julio Cortázar ‘s Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch ) are early examples predating the word “hypertext “, while a common pop-culture example is the Choose Your Own Adventure series in young adult fiction and other similar gamebooks . The Garden of Forking Paths is both a hypertext story and a description of a fictional hypertext work.
Contents [ hide ]
1 History
2 See also
3 References
4 External links
[edit ]
History
The first hypertext fictions were published prior to the development of the World Wide Web , using software such as Storyspace and HyperCard . Michael Joyce ‘s Afternoon, a story , first presented in 1987 and published by Eastgate Systems in 1991, is generally considered one of the first hypertext fictions. Afternoon was followed by a series of other Storyspace hypertext fictions from Eastgate Systems , including Stuart Moulthrop ‘s Victory Garden , its name was Penelope by Judy Malloy , (whose hyperfiction Uncle Roger was published online on Artcom Electronic Network on The WELL from 1986 to 1987) Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling , Shelley Jackson ‘s Patchwork Girl and Deena Larsen ‘s Marble Springs . Judy Malloy’s l0ve0ne , created in 1994, was the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop.
Douglas Cooper ‘s Delirium (1994) was the first novel serialized on the World Wide Web ; it permitted navigation between four parallel story strands. On June 21, 1996, Bobby Rabyd (aka Robert Arellano ) published the World Wide Web ‘s first interactive novel, [2] Sunshine 69 , with navigable maps of settings, a nonlinear calendar of scenes, and a character “suitcase” enabling readers to try on nine different points of view. Shortly thereafter, in 1997, Mark Amerika released GRAMMATRON , a multi-linear work which was eventually exhibited in art galleries. In 2000, it was included in the Whitney Biennial of American Art . [3]
Some other web examples of hypertext fiction include Adrienne Eisen’s Six Sex Scenes (1995), Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope (1995,1997), The Unknown (which won the trAce(Alt X award in 1998), The Company Therapist , and Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves of Girls (2001) (which won the ELO award for fiction in 2001).
The internationally oriented but US based Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) was founded in 1999 to promote the creation and enjoyment of electronic literature. Other organisations for the promotion of electronic literature include trAce Online Writing Community , a British organisation, started in 1995, that has fostered electronic literature in the UK, Dichtung Digital, a journal of criticism of electronic literature in English and German, and ELINOR, a network for electronic literature in the Nordic countries, which provides a directory of Nordic electronic literature . The Electronic Literature Directory lists many works of electronic literature in English and other languages.
[edit ]
See also
[edit ]
In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges created a hypertext style novel – The Garden of Forking Paths .
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think “, about a futuristic proto-hypertext device he called a Memex .
In 1963, Ted Nelson coined the terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’ in a model he developed for creating and using linked content (first published reference 1965 [2] ). He later worked with Andries van Dam to develop the Hypertext Editing System in 1967 at Brown University . Douglas Engelbart independently began working on his NLS system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding, personnel, and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until 1968. In December of that year, Engelbart demonstrated a hypertext interface to the public for the first time, in what has come to be known as “The Mother of All Demos “.
The first hypermedia application was the Aspen Movie Map in 1977. In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee created ENQUIRE , an early hypertext database system somewhat like a wiki . The early 1980s also saw a number of experimental hypertext and hypermedia programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web. Guide , the first significant hypertext system for personal computers , was developed by Peter J. Brown at UKC in 1982.
In August 1987, Apple Computer released HyperCard for the Macintosh line at the MacWorld convention . Its impact, combined with interest in Peter J. Brown ‘s GUIDE (marketed by OWL and released earlier that year) and Brown University’s Intermedia , led to broad interest in and enthusiasm for hypertext and new media. The first ACM Hypertext academic conference took place in November 1987, in Chapel Hill NC, where many other applications, including the hypertext literature writing software Storyspace were also demoed [3]
Meanwhile Nelson, who had been working on and advocating his Xanadu system for over two decades, along with the commercial success of HyperCard, stirred Autodesk to invest in his revolutionary ideas. The project continued at Autodesk for four years, but no product was released.
In the early 1990s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN , invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for simple and immediate information-sharing among physicists working at CERN and different universities or institutes all over the world.
“HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN… A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser… “
Tim Berners-Lee , R. Cailliau. 12 November 1990, CERN [4][5]
In 1992, Lynx was born as an early Internet web browser. Its ability to provide hypertext links within documents that could reach into documents anywhere on the Internet began the creation of the Web on the Internet.
After the release of web browsers for both the PC and Macintosh environments, traffic on the World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. Thus, all earlier hypertext systems were overshadowed by the success of the Web, even though it originally lacked many features of those earlier systems, such as an easy way to edit what you were reading, typed links , backlinks , transclusion , and source tracking .
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Implementations
Besides the already mentioned Project Xanadu , Hypertext Editing System , NLS , HyperCard , and World Wide Web, there are other noteworthy early implementations of hypertext, with different feature sets:
▪
▪ XML with the XLink extension – A newer hypertext markup language that extends and expands capabilities introduced by HTML .
▪ “The Garden of Forking Paths” Full text
▪ Stuart Moulthrop, “Concerning ‘forking paths'”
▪ Silvio Gaggi, “Hyperrealities and Hypertexts”
▪ Lev Manovich, “New Media from Borges to HTML”
▪ Nick Montfort introduction to “The Garden of Forking Paths” in “The New Media Reader.”
Dewey
Shields
“ It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book–what everyone else does not say in a whole book.
“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.” Thoreau
“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.
<div id=”reality”><a name=”4″></a><a href=”#4″><h2>4</h2></a><span class=”source”>Thoreau</span><div class=”realityclip”><p><span class=”leftquote”>“</span>In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.</p></div></div>
In 450 b.c., Bacchylides wrote, “One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition.”
John D’Agata, The Next American Essay
“ The aphorism is one of the earliest literary forms—the residue of complex thoughts filtered down to a single metaphor. By the second millennium b.c., in Sumer, aphorisms appeared together in anthologies, collections of sayings that were copied for noblemen, priests, and kings. These lists were then catalogued by theme: “Honesty,” “Friendship,” “Death.” When read together, these collections of sayings could be said to make a general argument on their common themes, or at least shed some light somewhere, or maybe simply obsess about a topic until a little dent has been made in the huge idea they all pondered. “Love.” Via editing and collage, the form germinated into longer, more complex, more sustained, and more sophisticated essayings. The Hebrew wisdom of Ecclesiastes is essentially a collection of aphorisms, as are Confucius’s religious musings and Heraclitus’s fragments. These extended aphorisms eventually crossed the border into essay: the diaries of Sei Shônagon, Anne Bradstreet’s letters, Kafka’s David Shields
In his preface to The History of the Peloponnesian War , Thucydides acknowledges that he “found it impossible to remember the exact wording of speeches. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would have done in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech.”
, Pound’s criticism.
John D’Agata, The Next American Essay
“ Plutarch sometimes bulleted his essays with as many as a hundred numbered sections, eschewing narrative completely and simply listing. His essay “Sayings by Spartan Women” itemizes quotations from unknown Spartan mothers, wives, daughters, and widows on a variety of topics without any transitional exposition or interpretation, or any suggestion whatsoever as to how we might read the John D’Agata, The Next American Essay
“ In 1830, Emerson was frustrated with sermons, with their “cold, mechanical preparations for a delivery most decorous—fine things, pretty things, wise things—but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling.” He wanted to find what he called “a new literature.” A German con artist, Johann Maelzel, visited America with a “panharmonicon,” an organ without keys. He would crank its heavy silver lever three times and step off to the side, and the machine would spit out an entire orchestra’s worth of sound: flutes, drums, trumpets, cymbals, trombones, a triangle, clarinets, violins. After seeing Maelzel’s machine perform, Emerson called the new literature he’d been looking for “a panharmonicon. Here everything is admissible—philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdote, jokes, ventriloquism—all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech.” or even, for that matter, why.
John D’Agata, The Next American Essay
“ “The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, or fantasy,” said the New York Globe in 1851 about Moby-Dick .
Subtopic
Metafiction
Another characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of pastiche , the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.
Background
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Notable influences
Postmodernist writers often point to early novels and story collections as inspiration for their experiments with narrative and structure: Don Quixote , 1001 Nights , The Decameron , and Candide , among many others. In the English language, Laurence Sterne ‘s 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , with its heavy emphasis on parody and narrative experimentation, is often cited as an early influence on postmodernism. There were many 19th century examples of attacks on Enlightenment concepts, parody, and playfulness in literature, including Lord Byron ‘s satire, especially Don Juan ; Thomas Carlyle ‘s Sartor Resartus ; Alfred Jarry ‘s ribald Ubu parodies and his invention of ‘Pataphysics ; Lewis Carroll ‘s playful experiments with signification; the work of Isidore Ducasse , Arthur Rimbaud , Oscar Wilde . Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work would serve as an influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August Strindberg , the Italian author Luigi Pirandello , and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht . In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and challenged the authority of the artist. [ clarification needed ] Tristan Tzara claimed in “How to Make a Dadaist Poem” that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst , for example). Artists associated with Surrealism , which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton , the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte ‘s experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault . Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges , an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. [1]
Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism . In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism , turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the “stream of consciousness ” styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce , or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot . In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins”. Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against “ruin” is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf ‘s Orlando , for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. [1]
Shift to postmodernism
As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism’s popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism’s start.
Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes ‘ The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of Waiting for Godot in 1953, the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida ‘s “Structure, Sign, and Play” lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan ‘s usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. [5]
Though postmodernist literature does not refer to everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd , the Beat Generation , and Magic Realism ) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled “postmodern”; more commonly, some key figures (Samuel Beckett , William S. Burroughs , Jorge Luis Borges , Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez ) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic.
The work of Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud , Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd . The term “Theatre of the Absurd” was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus ‘s concept of the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett . The work of Samuel Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce ; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says, “Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett’s experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres.[…] Beckett’s last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work […] He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters.” [6]
One writer associated with the Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs . Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction; it’s full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin , for the creation of the “cut-up ” technique, a technique (similar to Tzara’s “Dadaist Poem”) in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded .
Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov ; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern, see Brian McHale . [7]
Postmodernism in literature is not an organized movement with leaders or central figures; therefore, it is more difficult to say if it has ended or when it will end (compared to, say, declaring the end of modernism with the death of Joyce or Woolf). Arguably postmodernism peaked in the 60s and 70s with the publication of Catch-22 in 1961, Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the 80’s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver . Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast ” called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. [8] With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in 1985 or The Satanic Verses in 1988 to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.
A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace , Giannina Braschi , Dave Eggers , Michael Chabon , Zadie Smith , Chuck Palahniuk , Jennifer Egan , Neil Gaiman , Richard Powers , Jonathan Lethem — and publications such as McSweeney’s , The Believer , and the fiction pages of The New Yorker , herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or something else entirely—post-postmodernism. [1][9]
Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony , along with black humor and the general concept of “play” (related to Derrida’s concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text ) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism.
Thomas Pynchon in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within a serious context. The Crying of Lot 49 , for example, contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. [1][10][11]
Since postmodernism represents a decentered concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality : the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Critics point to this as an indication of postmodernism’s lack of originality and reliance on clichés. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales – as in works by Margaret Atwood , Donald Barthelme , and many other – or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ” by Jorge Luis Borges , a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker ‘s novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream . Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism is John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke ’s poem of the same name. [ citation needed ] Often intertextuality is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover ’s Pinocchio in Venice , for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann ’s Death in Venice . Also, Umberto Eco ’s The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle , Arthur Conan Doyle , and Borges. [12][13][14]
Pastiche
Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or “paste” together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity : for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, Derek Pell relies on collage and noir detective, erotica, travel guides, and how-to manuals, and so on. Though pastiche commonly refers to the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). For example, Thomas Pynchon includes in his novels elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction; songs; pop culture references; well-known, obscure, and fictional history mixed together; real contemporary and historical figures (Mickey Rooney and Wernher von Braun for example); a wide variety of well-known, obscure and fictional cultures and concepts. In Robert Coover ‘s 1977 novel The Public Burning , Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can also refer to compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson ‘s 1969 novel The Unfortunates ; it was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose. [1][15][16]
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Metafiction
Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or “foregrounding the apparatus”, as it’s typical of deconstructionist approaches, [17] making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for “willful suspension of disbelief”. [ citation needed ] For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody the idea of parody itself. [18][19][20]
Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino ‘s 1979 novel If on a winter’s night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique: the first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut’s own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O’Brien ‘s 1990 novel/story collection The Things They Carried , about one platoon’s experiences during the Vietnam War , features a character named Tim O’Brien; though O’Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O’Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, “How to Tell a True War Story”, questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable and heroic, moral war stories don’t capture the truth.
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Fabulation
Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction. By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators . A good example of fabulation is Salman Rushdie ´s Haroun and the Sea of Stories . [21]
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Poioumena
Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek : ποιούμενον , “product”) is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler, “the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth.” [22] In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle ‘s Sartor Resartus , and Laurence Sterne ‘s Tristram Shandy , which is about the narrator’s frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov ‘s Pale Fire , in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade’s long poem “Pale Fire”, but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie ‘s Midnight’s Children parallels the creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett ‘s trilogy (Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable ); Doris Lessing ‘s The Golden Notebook ; John Fowles ‘s Mantissa ; William Golding ‘s Paper Men ; and Gilbert Sorrentino ‘s Mulligan Stew . [14][22][23][24][25]
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Historiographic metafiction
Linda Hutcheon coined the term “historiographic metafiction” to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar ), Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert ), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini , Henry Ford , Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria , Booker T. Washington , Sigmund Freud , Carl Jung ), and Rabih Alameddine ‘s Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to the Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon ‘s Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian Period in The French Lieutenant’s Woman . In regards to critical theory, this technique can be related to The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes . [1]
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Temporal distortion
This is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and non-linear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut ‘s non-linear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming “unstuck in time”. In Flight to Canada , Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover ‘s “The Babysitter” from Pricksongs & Descants , the author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. [1]
Technoculture and hyperreality
Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the “cultural logic of late capitalism “. “Late capitalism” implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, Don DeLillo ‘s White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with a “white noise” of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson , Neal Stephenson , and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. [27][28][29] Steampunk , a subgenre of science fiction popularized in novels and comics by such writers as Alan Moore and James Blaylock , demonstrates postmodern pastiche, temporal distortion, and a focus on technoculture with its mix of futuristic technology and Victorian culture.
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Paranoia
Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the work of Thomas Pynchon , the sense of paranoia, the belief that there’s an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd . The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon has many possible interpretations. [30] This often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut , the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he’s convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human. [1]
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Different perspectives
John Barth , the postmodernist novelist who talks often about the label “postmodern”, wrote an influential essay in 1967 called “The Literature of Exhaustion ” and in 1979 wrote “Literature of Replenishment” in order to clarify the earlier essay. “Literature of Exhaustion” was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In “Literature of Replenishment” Barth says,
My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett’s Texts for Nothing … The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and “contentism,” pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction… [34]
Many of the well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II , one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller ‘s Catch-22 . Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war:
The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War , the cold war of the Fifties. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself … Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22 , J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man , Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road , Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , Thomas Pynchon was writing V. , and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat’s Cradle . I don’t think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn’t know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Pynchon and in Cat’s Cradle . [35]
Novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland . Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. [36]
Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” makes the connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what’s seen and what’s said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature:
It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists , the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by “postmodern.” The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of a culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR , the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor , and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 … Here’s Robert Coover ‘s 1966 A Public Burning , in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable , in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president. [37]
Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature:
Postmodernism … can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the “Chemical (Scottish) Generation” of the fin-de-siècle . In what follows, the term ‘postmodernist’ is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell , Fowles , Carter , Brooke-Rose , Barnes , Ackroyd , and Martin Amis ) while “post- modern” is applied to authors who have been less innovative. [38]
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Adventure
A laberingth as opposed to a maze
Interactive fiction , often abbreviated IF , describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games .
In common usage, the term refers to text adventures , a type of adventure game …
As a commercial product, interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity from 1979–1986, [3] as a dominant software product marketed for home computers . Because their text-only nature sidestepped the problem of writing for the widely divergent graphics architectures of the day, interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms, even those such as CP/M not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities.
Today, a steady stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems. Most of these games can be downloaded for free from the Interactive Fiction Archive .
The term “interactive fiction” is also occasionally used to refer to addventure games , [4] which are also called hypertext fiction , collaborative fiction , or even participatory novels, according to the New York Times . [5] It is also used to refer to literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, but rather the reader is given choices at different points in the text; the reader’s choice determines the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of interactive fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. For others, see gamebooks . Interactive fiction is sometimes used as a synonym for visual novel , a popular style of PC game in Japan . [6]
The first adventure games to appear were text adventures (later called interactive fiction ), which typically use a verb –noun parser to interact with the user. These evolved from early mainframe titles like Hunt the Wumpus (Gregory Yob ) and Adventure (Crowther and Woods ) into commercial games which were playable on personal computers , such as Infocom ‘s widely popular Zork series. Some companies that were important in bringing out text adventure games were Adventure International , Infocom , Level 9 Computing , Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House , with Infocom being the most well known.
Most text adventures tell the story as if the player himself inhabited the game world. The games did not specify any details about the protagonist, allowing the player to imagine him- or herself as the avatar . [1]
Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output.
Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as “get key” or “go east”, which are interpreted by a text parser . Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers, such as those built on Infocom’s ZIL (Zork Implementation Language ), could understand complete sentences. [7] Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as “open the red box with the green key then go north”. This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today.
Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. [2] These games are unique in that they may create an illogical space , where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today’s era of 3D gaming, [2] and the Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary ‘puzzles for the sake of puzzles’ and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced programmers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate.
Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons (‘MUDs’). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that aren’t possible in a single player environment.
Around 1975, Will Crowther , a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in its operating system , and later named Colossal Cave ). [10] Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends he slapped together a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who talked in full sentences and who understood simple two word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10 . Stanford University graduate student Don Woods discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , and in 1977 obtained and expanded Crowther’s source code (with Crowther’s permission). Crowther’s original version was an accurate simulation of the real Colossal Cave , but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge); Woods’s changes were reminiscent of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien , and included a troll, elves, and a volcano some claim is based on Mount Doom , but Woods says was not. [11][12]
In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPAnet , [13] and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems , and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft’s MS-DOS 5.0 OS. Adventure is a cornerstone of the online IF community; there currently exist dozens of different independently-programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems.
The largest company producing works of interactive fiction was Infocom , [14] which created the Zork series and many other titles, among them Trinity , The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and A Mind Forever Voyaging .
In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the Z-machine , a custom virtual machine which could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and which took standardized “story files” as input.
The Infocom parser was widely regarded as the best of its era. It accepted complex, complete sentence commands like “put the blue book on the writing desk” at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two word verb-noun combinations such as “put book”. The parser was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and later games would ‘understand’ multiple sentence input: ‘pick up the gem and put it in my bag. take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches’.
In a non-technical sense, Infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters.
Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom .
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Nethack
In the mid 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called Adventure . Crowther, an employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman [36] (a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers ) used the company’s PDP-10 to create the game, which required 300 kilobytes of memory. [36][37][38]
The game used a text interface to create an interactive adventure through an underground cave system, based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky . [36] Crowther’s work was later modified and expanded by programmer Don Woods using the SAIL computer at Stanford , [36] and the game became wildly popular among early computer enthusiasts, spreading across the nascent ARPANET in the late 1970s.
The combination of realistic cave descriptions and fantastical elements proved immensely appealing, and defined the adventure game genre for decades to come. Swords, magic words, puzzles involving objects, and vast underground realms would all become staples of the text adventure genre.
The “Armchair adventure” soon spread beyond college campuses as the microcomputing movement gained steam. Numerous variations of Adventure appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some of these later versions being re-christened Colossal Adventure or Colossal
Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, [1] in part due to the procedural generation of game content. [2] Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading others to develop a class of derivatives known collectively as “roguelikes “. [3] For example, it directly inspired Hack , [4][5] which in turn led to NetHack . [6] Roguelikes have since influenced commercial games outside the genre, such as Diablo . [7]
In Rogue , the player assumes the typical role of an adventurer of early fantasy role-playing games . The game starts at the uppermost level of an unmapped dungeon with myriad monsters and treasures . The goal is to fight one’s way to the bottom level, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (Rodney spelled backwards), then ascend to the surface. [8] Until the Amulet is retrieved, the player cannot return to earlier levels. Monsters in the levels become progressively more difficult to defeat.
The game’s setting was influenced by the text game Colossal Cave Adventure as well as Dungeons & Dragons , from which most of the monsters were, initially, closely modeled. Wichman has stated the monsters were soon altered “to avoid getting in trouble” with the creators of Dungeons & Dragons . [8]
In the original, all aspects of the game, including the dungeon, the player character , and monsters, are represented by letters and symbols. Monsters are represented by capital letters (such as Z for zombie), and as such there are twenty-six varieties. This type of display makes it appropriate for a non-graphical terminal . Rogue was one of the first widely used applications of the curses screen control library . Like all programs using this library, the game uses the termcap database to adapt to the capabilities of terminals made by different vendors. Later ports of Rogue apply extended character sets to the text user interface or replace it with graphical tiles .
The basic movement keys (h , left; j , down; k , up; and l , right) are the same as the cursor control keys in the vi editor. Other game actions also use single keystrokes—q to quaff a potion , w to wield a weapon, e to eat some food, etc. In the DOS version, the cursor keys specify movement, and the fast-move keys (H , J , K , and L ) are supplanted by use of the scroll lock key.
Each dungeon level comprises a grid of 3 rooms by 3 rooms, or dead end hallways where rooms would be expected. Later levels include mazes in the place of rooms as well. Unlike most adventure games of the time, the dungeon layout and the placement of objects within are randomly generated .
The game became popular enough to be distributed with Version 4.2 of BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) UNIX. [10] Rogue was ported by Michael Toy and Jon Lane to the IBM PC in 1984, [8] and then by Michael Toy to the Macintosh .Because the input and output of the original game is over a terminal interface, it is relatively easy in Unix to redirect output to another program. One such program, Rog-O-Matic , was developed to play and win the game. Ken Arnold said that he liked to make “sure that every subsequent version of rogue had a new feature in it that broke rogue-o-matic.” [18] Nevertheless, it remains an interesting study in expert system design and led to the development of other game-playing programs, typically called “borgs” or “bots”. Some target roguelikes, in particular Angband . [19]
Montage
Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for “build, organize”). Although Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s disagreed about how exactly to view montage, Sergei Eisenstein marked a note of accord in “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” when he noted that montage is “the nerve of cinema”, and that “to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema”.
While several Soviet filmmakers, such as Lev Kuleshov , Dziga Vertov , and Vsevolod Pudovkin put forth explanations of what constitutes the montage effect, Eisenstein’s view that “montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent thoughts” wherein “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other” has become most widely accepted.
Eisenstein
Eisenstein was a pioneer in the use of montage , a specific use of film editing . He and his contemporary, Lev Kuleshov , two of the earliest film theorists, argued that montage was the essence of the cinema.
His writings and films have continued to have a major impact on subsequent filmmakers. Eisenstein believed that editing could be used for more than just expounding a scene or moment, through a “linkage” of related images. Eisenstein felt the “collision” of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He believed that an idea should be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots, bringing an element of collage into film. He developed what he called “methods of montage”:
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Eisenstein’s theory of montage
In formal terms, this style of editing offers discontinuity in graphic qualities, violations of the 180 degree rule , and the creation of impossible spatial matches. It is not concerned with the depiction of a comprehensible spatial or temporal continuity as is found in the classical Hollywood continuity system. It draws attention to temporal ellipses because changes between shots are obvious, less fluid, and non-seamless. [ clarification needed ]
Eisenstein describes five methods of montage in his introductory essay “Word and Image”. These varieties of montage build one upon the other so the “higher” forms also include the approaches of the “simpler” varieties. In addition, the “lower” types of montage are limited to the complexity of meaning which they can communicate, and as the montage rises in complexity, so will the meaning it is able to communicate (primal emotions to intellectual ideals). It is easiest to understand these as part of a spectrum where, at one end, the image content matters very little, while at the other it determines everything about the choices and combinations of the edited film.
Eisenstein’s montage theories are based on the idea that montage originates in the “collision” between different shots in an illustration of the idea of thesis and antithesis. This basis allowed him to argue that montage is inherently dialectical , thus it should be considered a demonstration of Marxism and Hegelian philosophy. His collisions of shots were based on conflicts of scale, volume, rhythm, motion (speed, as well as direction of movement within the frame), as well as more conceptual values such as class.
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More on intellectual montage
In his later writings, Eisenstein argues that montage, especially intellectual montage, is an alternative system to continuity editing . He argued that “Montage is conflict” (dialectical) where new ideas, emerge from the collision of the montage sequence (synthesis) and where the new emerging ideas are not innate in any of the images of the edited sequence. A new concept explodes into being. His understanding of montage, thus, illustrates Marxist dialectics.
Concepts similar to intellectual montage would arise during the first half of the 20th century, such as Imagism in poetry (specifically Pound’s Ideogrammic Method ), or Cubism’s attempt at synthesizing multiple perspectives into one painting. The idea of associated concrete images creating a new (often abstract) image was an important aspect of much early Modernist art.
Eisenstein relates this to non-literary “writing” in pre-literate societies, such as the ancient use of pictures and images in sequence, that are therefore in “conflict”. Because the pictures are relating to each other, their collision creates the meaning of the “writing”. Similarly, he describes this phenomenon as dialectical materialism .
Eisenstein argued that the new meaning that emerged out of conflict is the same phenomenon found in the course of historical events of social and revolutionary change. He used intellectual montage in his feature films (such as Battleship Potemkin and October ) to portray the political situation surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution .
He also believed that intellectual montage expresses how everyday thought processes happen. In this sense, the montage will in fact form thoughts in the minds of the viewer, and is therefore a powerful tool for propaganda.
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Intellectual montage follows in the tradition of the ideological Russian Proletcult Theatre which was a tool of political agitation. In his film Strike , Eisenstein includes a sequence with cross-cut editing between the slaughter of a bull and police attacking workers. He thereby creates a film metaphor: assaulted workers = slaughtered bull. The effect that he wished to produce was not simply to show images of people’s lives in the film but more importantly to shock the viewer into understanding the reality of their own lives. Therefore, there is a revolutionary thrust to this kind of film making.
Eisenstein discussed how a perfect example of his theory is found in his film October , which contains a sequence where the concept of “God” is connected to class structure, and various images that contain overtones of political authority and divinity are edited together in descending order of impressiveness so that the notion of God eventually becomes associated with a block of wood. He believed that this sequence caused the minds of the viewer to automatically reject all political class structures.
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Kuleshov
the original kuleshov expiriment.mov – YouTube
Mozzhukhin’s most lasting contribution to the theoretical concept of film as image is the legacy of his own face in recurring representation of illusory reactions seen in ‘s psychological montage experiment which demonstrated the Kuleshov Effect . In 1918, the first full year of the Russian Revolution , Kuleshov assembled his revolutionary illustration of the application of the principles of film editing out of footage from one of Mozzhukhin’s Tsarist -era films which had been left behind when he, along with his entire film production company, departed for the relative safety of Crimea in 1917.
Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mosjoukine was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, a little girl’s coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was “looking at” the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mosjoukine was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience “raved about the acting… the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.” [1]
Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings. Kuleshov believed this,along with montage, had to be the basis of cinema as an independent art form. [2]
The effect has also been studied by psychologists , and is well-known among modern film makers. Alfred Hitchcock refers to the effect in his conversations with François Truffaut , using actor James Stewart as the example. [3]
The experiment itself was created by assembling fragments of pre-existing film from the Tsarist film industry, with no new material. Mosjoukine had been the leading romantic “star” of Tsarist cinema, and familiar to the audience.
Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov’s view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination. The raw materials of such an art work need not be original, but are pre-fabricated elements which can be disassembled and re-assembled by the artist into new juxtapositions.
The montage experiments carried out by Kuleshov in the late 1910s and early 1920s formed the theoretical basis of Soviet montage cinema, culminating in the famous films of the late 1920s by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein , Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov , among others. These films included The Battleship Potemkin , October , Mother , The End of St. Petersburg , and The Man with a Movie Camera .
Soviet montage cinema was suppressed under Joseph Stalin during the 1930s as a dangerous example of Formalism in the arts , and as being incompatible with the official Soviet artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism .Lev Kuleshov may well be the very first film theorist as he was a leader in Soviet montage theory — developing his theories of editing before those of Sergei Eisenstein (briefly a student of Kuleshov) and Vsevolod Pudovkin . For Kuleshov, the essence of the cinema was editing, the juxtaposition of one shot with another. To illustrate this principle, he created what has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiment . In this now-famous editing exercise, shots of an actor were intercut with various meaningful images (a casket, a bowl of soup, and so on) in order to show how editing changes viewers’ interpretations of images.
Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings. Kuleshov believed this,along with montage, had to be the basis of cinema as an independent art form. [2]
The experiment itself was created by assembling fragments of pre-existing film from the Tsarist film industry, with no new material. Mozzhukhin had been the leading romantic “star” of Tsarist cinema, and familiar to the audience.
Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov’s view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination. The raw materials of such an art work need not be original, but are pre-fabricated elements which can be disassembled and re-assembled by the artist into new juxtapositions.
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Vertov
Man with a Movie Camera (Russian : Человек с киноаппаратом), sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera , The Man with a Camera , The Man With the Kinocamera , or Living Russia [1] is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film , with no story and no actors, [2] by Russian director Dziga Vertov , edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova .
The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere . For instance, the film uses such scenes as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, even filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed.
Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put it in a database, which Svilova later edited [ citation needed ] . The narrative part of this process was her job. She had to go into that random pool of clips that Vertov filmed, edit it, and put it in some kind of order. Vertov’s purpose of all this was to break the mold of a linear film that the world was used to seeing in those days [ citation needed ] .
The film was criticized for both the stagings and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director’s frequent assailing of fiction film as a new “opiate of the masses.
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MultiView
Third Mind
Intersubjectivity
The Third Mind is a combination literary essay and writing collection showcasing a form of writing popularized by Burroughs and Gysin in the 1960s called “ cut-ups “. Cut-ups involves taking (usually) unrelated texts, literally cutting the pages up, and then combining and rearranging the pieces to form new narratives and often-surreal images
The Third Mind (as a concept) The significance of “The Third Mind” is that it is a shared consciousness that can only be reached by two (or more) people together– they access a place that neither could reach alone. Person A and Person B can find new ideas in dialogue because they are improvisationally responding to each other’s unpredictable mind. Burroughs was trying to access this unpredictability by cutting and rearranging texts into nonsensical riddles. By weaving the nonsense into a linear narrative, he forced himself into dialogue with an unpredictable “other”. This practice builds on the classic Zen koan– a riddle designed to transcend the “rational” mind and lead a student to satori (enlightenment).
Third Ear
Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a …
Third Eye
The third eye (also known as the inner eye ) is a mystical and esoteric concept referring in part to the ajna (brow) chakra in certain eastern spiritual traditions. It is also spoken of as the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness .
In New Age spirituality, the third eye may alternately symbolize a state of enlightenment or the evocation of mental images having deeply personal spiritual or psychological significance. The third eye is often associated with visions , clairvoyance (which includes the ability to observe chakras and auras ), [1] precognition , and out-of-body experiences . People who have allegedly developed the capacity to utilize their third eyes are sometimes known as seers .
In Hinduism and Buddhism , the third eye is a symbol of enlightenment (see moksha and nirvana ). In the Indian tradition, it is referred to as the gyananakashu , “the eye of knowledge”, which is the seat of the “teacher inside” or antar-guru . The third eye is the ajna chakra (sixth chakra) also known as brow chakra or brow center. This is commonly denoted in Indian and East Asian iconography with a dot, eye or mark on the forehead of deities or enlightened beings, such as Shiva , the Buddha , or any number of yogis , sages and bodhisattvas . This symbol is called the “Third Eye” or “Eye of Wisdom”, or, in Buddhism, the urna . In Hinduism, it is believed that the opening of Shiva’s third eye causes the eventual destruction of the physical universe.
Many Hindus wear a tilaka between the eyebrows to represent the third eye.
In the Upanishads , a human being is likened to a city with ten gates. Nine gates (eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, urethra, anus) lead outside to the sensory world. The third eye is the tenth gate and leads to inner realms housing myriad spaces of consciousness .
an teachings
According to the teaching of Fr. Richard Rohr the concept of the ‘third eye’ is a metaphor for non-dualistic thinking–the way the mystics see. In Rhohr’s concept, mystics employ the ‘first eye’ (sensory input such as sight) and the second eye (the eye of reason, meditation, and reflection), “but they know not to confuse knowledge with depth, or mere correct information with the transformation of consciousness itself. The mystical gaze builds upon the first two eyes—and yet goes further.”
“It happens whenever, by some wondrous “coincidence,” our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant. I like to call it presence. It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection, and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness at the very same time.” Rohr refers to this level of awareness as “having the mind of Christ”. [2]
According to the gnostic teachings of Samael Aun Weor , the third eye is referenced symbolically and functionally several times in the Book of Revelation , [ which? ] which as a whole is seen as a work describing Kundalini and its progression upwards through three and a half turns and seven chakras. This interpretation equates the third eye with the sixth of the seven churches of Asia detailed therein, the Church of Philadelphia. [3]
In terms of Kabbalah , the Ajna chakra is attributed to the sphere of Chokmah, [4] or Wisdom, although others regard the third eye as corresponding to the non-emanated sephirah of da’ath (knowledge).
Dynamics
Freud
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Wit and Ah-ha |
Schafer
Except with respect to relatively clearcut extremes, the analyst cannot know exactly just when, what, how, and how long to interpret, or, as the case may be, not to interpret but instead to listen or introduce some other type of intervention. As a rule, the meanings and effects of the analyst’s interventions and
Schafer, Roy (2011-09-28). The Analytic Attitude (Kindle Locations 251-253). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
the lesson is just that some negative countertransference has developed which calls for self-analysis or supervisory consultation.
Schafer, Roy (2011-09-28). The Analytic Attitude (Kindle Location 298). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
The appropriate analytic attitude is one of finding out: finding out what the analysis itself will be or be concerned with;
Schafer, Roy (2011-09-28). The Analytic Attitude (Kindle Locations 460-461). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition. I nterpretations of life stories
the psychoanalytic process is a study of itself as it is created in and through the analytic dialogue (see chapter 14). What else can it be
Schafer, Roy (2011-09-28). The Analytic Attitude (Kindle Locations 467-468). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
goal. Second, it indicates the continuing need for flexibility and imagination on the analyst’s part in achieving, with suitable variation from one analysand to the next, an analytic version of himself or herself, a second self that integrates the analyst’s own biography and personality with the constraints of the analytic method and the needs of each analysand (see chapter 3). There
Schafer, Roy (2011-09-28). The Analytic Attitude (Kindle Locations 529-532). Karnac Books. Kindle Edition.
Schafer began to present traditional psychoanalytical concepts not as scientific principles but as interpretative storylines. In this view there is no single correct interpretation of a life story; rather, like other narrative constructions, such as poems or novels, the account lends itself to various understandings each of which can legitimately claim to be true while emphasizing another way of looking at it. According to Mitchell’s alternative view of Schafer’s work, the value of an interpretation lies not in its objectivity or correctness, but in its potential for opening up new forms of experience and allowing the analysand to claim a deeper and broader sense of its own activity. [2]
Narrational process
A narrational process in psychoanalysis consists of two people: the psychoanalyst and the analysand. Roy Schafer prefers the use of the word analysand instead of patient to avoid the implication of disease. Schafer describes psychoanalysts as ‘retellers of narrations’, but he states that more descriptions of psychoanalysts are possible. [3] The analyst’s retelling influences the ‘what and how’ of the stories told by the analysand. The analyst establishes new questions that amount to narrative possibilities. [4]
Narration. Following literary theorists, who examined the role of telling and showing in narration, Roy Schafer makes a distinction between telling and showing in the psychoanalytical situation. Telling happens when the analysand tells in words about events; about the past. Showing happens when the analysand conveys ideas, feelings, fantasies or reactions, verbal or non-verbal and freely associates these in an unselective way and without rehearsal. The analysand seems to be operating in the present; even when talking about the past. [3]
Subjectivity
Another important aspect of Schafer concerning the use of narratives in the analytical situation is subjectivity . Subjectivity means that multiple interpretations are possible for one story.
The subject of the story is reconsidered, the story is told in a different way, the story gets a different context and a different interpretation. Hereby the reconstruction of childhood and past are interdependent. What seems to be a truth about the past at one moment, can become untrue or nuanced by new insights, which causes a new or more differentiated truth. In this way, the view on the past and the present are not separated, but interrelated. So, the analyst helps the analysand to view his story in a different light and this enriches the analysand’s subjectivity. [5]
Transference
Relational/Transferential Psychotherapy
Listening with the Third Ear through the Third Mind
Transference as fictionalization
Quotes
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Secondary Elaboration
CHAPTER SIX (Continued…)
I. The Secondary Elaboration
We will at last turn our attention to the fourth of the factors participating in dream-formation.
If we continue our investigation of the dream-content on the lines already laid down- that is, by examining the origin in the dream-thoughts of conspicuous occurrences- we come upon elements that can be explained only by making an entirely new assumption. I have in mind cases where one manifests astonishment, anger, or resistance in a dream, and that, too, in respect of part of the dream-content itself. Most of these impulses of criticism in dreams are not directed against the dream-content, but prove to be part of the dream-material, taken over and fittingly applied, as I have already shown by suitable examples. There are, however, criticisms of this sort which are not so derived: their correlatives cannot be found in the dream-material. What, for instance, is meant by the criticism not infrequent in dreams: “After all, it’s only a dream”? This is a genuine criticism of the dream, such as I might make if I were awake, Not infrequently it is only the prelude to waking; even oftener it is preceded by a painful feeling, which subsides when the actuality of the dream- state has been affirmed. The thought: “After all, it’s only a dream” in the dream itself has the same intention as it has on the stage on the lips of Offenbach’s Belle Helene; it seeks to minimize what has just been experienced, and to secure indulgence for what is to follow. It serves to lull to sleep a certain mental agency which at the given moment has every occasion to rouse itself and forbid the continuation of the dream, or the scene. But it is more convenient to go on sleeping and to tolerate the dream, “because, after all, it’s only a dream.” I imagine that the disparaging criticism: “After all, it’s only a dream,” appears in the dream at the moment when the censorship. which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been surprised by the already admitted dream. It is too late to suppress the dream, and the agency therefore meets with this remark the anxiety or painful emotion which rises into the dream. It is an expression of the esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychic censorship.
In this example we have incontestable proof that everything which the dream contains does not come from the dream-thoughts, but that a psychic function, which cannot be differentiated from our waking thoughts, may make contributions to the dream-content. The question arises, does this occur only in exceptional cases, or does the psychic agency, which is otherwise active only as the censorship, play a constant part in dream-formation?
One must decide unhesitatingly for the latter view. It is indisputable that the censoring agency, whose influence we have so far recognized only in the restrictions of and omissions in the dream-content, is likewise responsible for interpolations in and amplifications of this content. Often these interpolations are readily recognized; they are introduced with hesitation, prefaced by an “as if”; they have no special vitality of their own, and are constantly inserted at points where they may serve to connect two portions of the dream-content or create a continuity between two sections of the dream. They manifest less ability to adhere in the memory than do the genuine products of the dream-material; if the dream is forgotten, they are forgotten first, and I strongly suspect that our frequent complaint that although we have dreamed so much we have forgotten most of the dream, and have remembered only fragments, is explained by the immediate falling away of just these cementing thoughts. In a complete analysis, these interpolations are often betrayed by the fact that no material is to be found for them in the dream- thoughts. But after careful examination I must describe this case as the less usual one; in most cases the interpolated thoughts can be traced to material in the dream-thoughts which can claim a place in the dream neither by its own merits nor by way of over- determination. Only in the most extreme cases does the psychic function in dream-formation which we are now considering rise to original creation; whenever possible it makes use of anything appropriate that it can find in the dream-material.
What distinguishes this part of the dream-work, and also betrays it, is its tendency. This function proceeds in a manner which the poet maliciously attributes to the philosopher: with its rags and tatters it stops up the breaches in the structure of the dream. The result of its efforts is that the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible experience. But the effort is not always crowned with complete success. Thus, dreams occur which may, upon superficial examination, seem faultlessly logical and correct; they start from a possible situation, continue it by means of consistent changes, and bring it- although this is rare- to a not unnatural conclusion. These dreams have been subjected to the most searching elaboration by a psychic function similar to our waking thought; they seem to have a meaning, but this meaning is very far removed from the real meaning of the dream. If we analyze them, we are convinced that the secondary elaboration has handled the material with the greatest freedom, and has retained as little as possible of its proper relations. These are the dreams which have, so to speak, already been once interpreted before we subject them to waking interpretation. In other dreams this tendencious elaboration has succeeded only up to a point; up to this point consistency seems to prevail, but then the dream becomes nonsensical or confused; but perhaps before it concludes it may once more rise to a semblance of rationality In yet other dreams the elaboration has failed completely; we find ourselves helpless, confronted with a senseless mass of fragmentary contents.
I do not wish to deny to this fourth dream-forming power, which will soon become familiar to us- it is in reality the only one of the four dream-creating factors which is familiar to us in other connections- I do not wish to deny to this fourth factor the faculty of creatively making new contributions to our dreams. But its influence is certainly exerted, like that of the other factors, mainly in the preference and selection of psychic material already formed in the dream-thoughts. Now there is a case where it is to a great extent spared the work of building, as it were, a facade to the dream by the fact that such a structure, only waiting to be used, already exists in the material of the dream-thoughts. I am accustomed to describe the element of the dream-thoughts which I have in mind as phantasy; I shall perhaps avoid misunderstanding if I at once point to the day-dream as an analogy in waking life. * The part played by this element in our psychic life has not yet been fully recognized and revealed by psychiatrists; though M. Benedikt has, it seems to me, made a highly promising beginning. Yet the significance of the day-dream has not escaped the unerring insight of the poets; we are all familiar with the description of the day-dreams of one of his subordinate characters which Alphonse Daudet has given us in his Nabab. The study of the psychoneuroses discloses the astonishing fact that these phantasies or day-dreams are the immediate predecessors of symptoms of hysteria- at least, of a great many of them; for hysterical symptoms are dependent not upon actual memories, but upon the phantasies built up on a basis of memories. The frequent occurrence of conscious day-phantasies brings these formations to our ken; but while some of these phantasies are conscious, there is a super-abundance of unconscious phantasies, which must perforce remain unconscious on account of their content and their origin in repressed material. A more thorough examination of the character of these day- phantasies shows with what good reason the same name has been given to these formations as to the products of nocturnal thought- dreams. They have essential features in common with nocturnal dreams; indeed, the investigation of day-dreams might really have afforded the shortest and best approach to the understanding of nocturnal dreams.
* Reve, petit roman = day-dream, story.
Like dreams, they are wish-fulfillments; like dreams, they are largely based upon the impressions of childish experiences; like dreams, they obtain a certain indulgence from the censorship in respect of their creations. If we trace their formation, we become aware how the wish-motive which has been operative in their production has taken the material of which they are built, mixed it together, rearranged it, and fitted it together into a new whole. They bear very much the same relation to the childish memories to which they refer as many of the baroque palaces of Rome bear to the ancient ruins, whose hewn stones and columns have furnished the material for the structures built in the modern style.
In the secondary elaboration of the dream-content which we have ascribed to our fourth dream-forming factor, we find once more the very same activity which is allowed to manifest itself, uninhibited by other influences, in the creation of day-dreams. We may say, without further preliminaries, that this fourth factor of ours seeks to construct something like a day-dream from the material which offers itself. But where such a day-dream has already been constructed in the context of the dream-thoughts, this factor of the dream-work will prefer to take possession of it, and contrive that it gets into the dream-content. There are dreams that consist merely of the repetition of a day-phantasy, which has perhaps remained unconscious- as, for instance, the boy’s dream that he is riding in a war-chariot with the heroes of the Trojan war. In my Autodidasker dream the second part of the dream at least is the faithful repetition of a day-phantasy- harmless in itself- of my dealings with Professor N. The fact that the exciting phantasy forms only a part of the dream, or that only a part of it finds its way into the dream-content, is due to the complexity of the conditions which the dream must satisfy at its genesis. On the whole, the phantasy is treated like any other component of the latent material; but it is often still recognizable as a whole in the dream. In my dreams there are often parts which are brought into prominence by their producing a different impression from that produced by the other parts. They seem to me to be in a state of flux, to be more coherent and at the same time more transient than other portions of the same dream. I know that these are unconscious phantasies which find their way into the context of the dream, but I have never yet succeeded in registering such a phantasy. For the rest, these phantasies, like all the other component parts of the dream- thoughts, are jumbled together, condensed, superimposed, and so on; but we find all the transitional stages, from the case in which they may constitute the dream-content, or at least the dream-facade, unaltered, to the most contrary case, in which they are represented in the dream-content by only one of their elements, or by a remote allusion to such an element. The fate of the phantasies in the dream-thoughts is obviously determined by the advantages they can offer as against the claims of the censorship and the pressure of condensation.
In my choice of examples for dream-interpretation I have, as far as possible, avoided those dreams in which unconscious phantasies play a considerable part, because the introduction of this psychic element would have necessitated an extensive discussion of the psychology of unconscious thought. But even in this connection I cannot entirely avoid the phantasy, because it often finds its way into the dream complete, and still more often perceptibly glimmers through it. I might mention yet one more dream, which seems to be composed of two distinct and opposed phantasies, overlapping here and there, of which the first is superficial, while the second becomes, as it were, the interpretation of the first. *
* I have analyzed an excellent example of a dream of this kind, having its origin in the stratification of several phantasies, in the Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Collected Papers, vol. III). I undervalued the significance of such phantasies for dream-formation as long as I was working principally on my own dreams, which were rarely based upon day- dreams but most frequently upon discussions and mental conflicts. With other persons it is often much easier to prove the complete analogy between the nocturnal dream and the day-dream. In hysterical patients an attack may often be replaced by a dream; it is then obvious that the day-dream phantasy is the first step for both these psychic formations.
The dream- it is the only one of which I possess no careful notes- is roughly to this effect: The dreamer- a young unmarried man- is sitting in his favorite inn, which is seen correctly; several persons come to fetch him, among them someone who wants to arrest him. He says to his table companions, “I will pay later, I am coming back.” But they cry, smiling scornfully: “We know all about that; that’s what everybody says.” One guest calls after him: “There goes another one.” He is then led to a small place where he finds a woman with a child in her arms. One of his escorts says: “This is Herr Muller.” A commissioner or some other official is running through a bundle of tickets or papers, repeating Muller, Muller, Muller. At last the commissioner asks him a question, which he answers with a “Yes.” He then takes a look at the woman, and notices that she has grown a large beard.
The two component parts are here easily separable. What is superficial is the phantasy of being arrested; this seems to be newly created by the dream-work. But behind it the phantasy of marriage is visible, and this material, on the other hand, has been slightly modified by the dream-work, and the features which may be common to the two phantasies appear with special distinctness, as in Galton’s composite photographs. The promise of the young man, who is at present a bachelor, to return to his place at his accustomed table- the skepticism of his drinking companions, made wise by their many experiences- their calling after him: “There goes (marries) another one”- are all features easily susceptible of the other interpretation, as is the affirmative answer given to the official. Running through a bundle of papers and repeating the same name corresponds to a subordinate but easily recognized feature of the marriage ceremony- the reading aloud of the congratulatory telegrams which have arrived at irregular intervals, and which, of course, are all addressed to the same name. In the personal appearance of the bride in this dream the marriage phantasy has even got the better of the arrest phantasy which screens it. The fact that this bride finally wears a beard I can explain from information received- I had no opportunity of making an analysis. The dreamer had, on the previous day, been crossing the street with a friend who was just as hostile to marriage as himself, and had called his friend’s attention to a beautiful brunette who was coming towards them. The friend had remarked: “Yes, if only these women wouldn’t get beards as they grow older, like their fathers.”
Of course, even in this dream there is no lack of elements with which the dream-distortion has done deep work. Thus, the speech, “I will pay later,” may have reference to the behaviour feared on the part of the father-in-law in the matter of a dowry. Obviously all sorts of misgivings are preventing the dreamer from surrendering himself with pleasure to the phantasy of marriage. One of these misgivings- at with marriage he might lose his freedom- has embodied itself in the transformation of a scene of arrest.
If we once more return to the thesis that the dream-work prefers to make use of a ready-made phantasy, instead of first creating one from the material of the dream-thoughts, we shall perhaps be able to solve one of the most interesting problems of the dream. I have related the dream of Maury, who is struck on the back of the neck by a small board, and wakes after a long dream- a complete romance of the period of the French Revolution. Since the dream is produced in a coherent form, and completely fits the explanation of the waking stimulus, of whose occurrence the sleeper could have had no forboding, only one assumption seems possible, namely, that the whole richly elaborated dream must have been composed and dreamed in the short interval of time between the falling of the board on cervical vertebrae and the waking induced by the blow. We should not venture to ascribe such rapidity to the mental operations of the waking state, so that we have to admit that the dream-work has the privilege of a remarkable acceleration of its issue.
To this conclusion, which rapidly became popular, more recent authors (Le Lorrain, Egger, and others) have opposed emphatic objections; some of them doubt the correctness of Maury’s record of the dream, some seek to show that the rapidity of our mental operations in waking life is by no means inferior to that which we can, without reservation, ascribe to the mental operations in dreams. The discussion raises fundamental questions, which I do not think are at all near solution. But I must confess that Egger’s objections, for example, to Maury’s dream of the guillotine, do not impress me as convincing. I would suggest the following explanation of this dream: Is it so very improbable that Maury’s dream may have represented a phantasy which had been preserved for years in his memory, in a completed state, and which was awakened- I should like to say, alluded to- at the moment when he became aware of the waking stimulus? The whole difficulty of composing so long a story, with all its details, in the exceedingly short space of time which is here at the dreamer’s disposal then disappears; the story was already composed. If the board had struck Maury’s neck when he was awake, there would perhaps have been time for the thought: “Why, that’s just like being guillotined.” But as he is struck by the board while asleep, the dream-work quickly utilizes the incoming stimulus for the construction of a wish-fulfillment, as if it thought (this is to be taken quite figuratively): “Here is a good opportunity to realize the wish-phantasy which I formed at such and such a time while I was reading.” It seems to me undeniable that this dream-romance is just such a one as a young man is wont to construct under the influence of exciting impressions. Who has not been fascinated- above all, a Frenchman and a student of the history of civilization- by descriptions of the Reign of Terror, in which the aristocracy, men and women, the flower of the nation, showed that it was possible to die with a light heart, and preserved their ready wit and the refinement of their manners up to the moment of the last fateful summons? How tempting to fancy oneself in the midst of all this, as one of these young men who take leave of their ladies with a kiss of the hand, and fearlessly ascend the scaffold! Or perhaps ambition was the ruling motive of the phantasy- the ambition to put oneself in the place of one of those powerful personalities who, by their sheer force of intellect and their fiery eloquence, ruled the city in which the heart of mankind was then beating so convulsively; who were impelled by their convictions to send thousands of human beings to their death, and were paving the way for the transformation of Europe; who, in the meantime, were not sure of their own heads, and might one day lay them under the knife of the guillotine, perhaps in the role of a Girondist or the hero Danton? The detail preserved in the memory of the dream, accompanied by an enormous crowd, seems to show that Maury’s phantasy was an ambitious one of just this character.
But the phantasy prepared so long ago need not be experienced again in sleep; it is enough that it should be, so to speak, “touched off.” What I mean is this: If a few notes are struck, and someone says, as in Don Juan: “That is from The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart,” memories suddenly surge up within me, none of which I can recall to consciousness a moment later. The phrase serves as a point of irruption from which a complete whole is simultaneously put into a condition of stimulation. It may well be the same in unconscious thinking. Through the waking stimulus the psychic station is excited which gives access to the whole guillotine phantasy. This phantasy, however, is not run through in sleep, but only in the memory of the awakened sleeper. Upon waking, the sleeper remembers in detail the phantasy which was transferred as a whole into the dream. At the same time, he has no means of assuring himself that he is really remembering something which was dreamed. The same explanation- namely, that one is dealing with finished phantasies which have been evoked as wholes by the waking stimulus- may be applied to other dreams which are adapted to the waking stimulus- for example, to Napoleon’s dream of a battle before the explosion of a bomb. Among the dreams collected by Justine Tobowolska in her dissertation on the apparent duration of time in dreams, * I think the most corroborative is that related by Macario (1857) as having been dreamed by a playwright, Casimir Bonjour. Bonjour intended one evening to witness the first performance of one of his own plays, but he was so tired that he dozed off in his chair behind the scenes just as the curtain was rising. In his sleep he went through all the five acts of his play, and observed all the various signs of emotion which were manifested by the audience during each individual scene. At the close of the performance, to his great satisfaction, he heard his name called out amidst the most lively manifestations of applause. Suddenly he woke. He could hardly believe his eyes or his ears; the performance had not gone beyond the first lines of the first scene; he could not have been asleep for more than two minutes. As for the dream, the running through the five acts of the play and the observing the attitude of the public towards each individual scene need not, we may venture to assert, have been something new, produced while the dreamer was asleep; it may have been a repetition of an already completed work of the phantasy. Tobowolska and other authors have emphasized a common characteristic of dreams that show an accelerated flow of ideas: namely, that they seem to be especially coherent, and not at all like other dreams, and that the dreamer’s memory of them is summary rather than detailed. But these are precisely the characteristics which would necessarily be exhibited by ready-made phantasies touched off by the dream- work- a conclusion which is not, of course, drawn by these authors. I do not mean to assert that all dreams due to a waking stimulus admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated flux of ideas in dreams is entirely disposed of in this manner.
* Justine Tobowolska, Etude sur les illusions de temps dans les reves du sommeil normal (1900) p. 53.
And here we are forced to consider the relation of this secondary elaboration of the dream-content to the other factors of the dream-work. May not the procedure perhaps be as follows? The dream-forming factors, the efforts at condensation, the necessity of evading the censorship, and the regard for representability by the psychic means of the dream first of all create from the dream- material a provisional dream-content, which is subsequently modified until it satisfies as far as possible the exactions of a secondary agency. No, this is hardly probable. We must rather assume that the requirements of this agency constitute from the very first one of the conditions which the dream must satisfy, and that this condition, as well as the conditions of condensation, the opposing censorship, and representability, simultaneously influence, in an inductive and selective manner, the whole mass of material in the dream-thoughts. But of the four conditions necessary for dream-formation, the last recognized is that whose exactions appear to be least binding upon the dream. The following consideration makes it seem very probable that this psychic function, which undertakes the so-called secondary elaboration of the dream-content, is identical with the work of our waking thought: Our waking (preconscious) thought behaves towards any given perceptual material precisely as the function in question behaves towards the dream-content. It is natural to our waking thought to create order in such material, to construct relations, and to subject it to the requirements of an intelligible coherence. Indeed, we go rather too far in this respect; the tricks of conjurers befool us by taking advantage of this intellectual habit of ours. In the effort to combine in an intelligible manner the sensory impressions which present themselves we often commit the most curious mistakes, and even distort the truth of the material before us. The proofs of this fact are so familiar that we need not give them further consideration here. We overlook errors which make nonsense of a printed page because we imagine the proper words. The editor of a widely read French journal is said to have made a bet that he could print the words from in front or from behind in every sentence of a long article without any of his readers noticing it. He won his bet. Years ago I came across a comical example of false association in a newspaper. After the session of the French Chamber in which Dupuy quelled the panic, caused by the explosion of a bomb thrown by an anarchist, with the courageous words, “La seance continue,” * the visitors in the gallery were asked to testify as to their impressions of the outrage. Among them were two provincials. One of these said that immediately after the end of a speech he had heard a detonation, but that he had thought that it was the parliamentary custom to fire a shot whenever a speaker had finished. The other, who had apparently already listened to several speakers, had got hold of the same idea, but with this variation, that he supposed the shooting to be a sign of appreciation following a specially successful speech.
* The meeting will continue.
Thus, the psychic agency which approaches the dream-content with the demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to a first interpretation, and in doing so leads to the complete misunderstanding of it, is none other than our normal thought. In our interpretation the rule will be, in every case, to disregard the apparent coherence of the dream as being of suspicious origin and, whether the elements are confused or clear, to follow the same regressive path to the dream-material.
At the same time, we note those factors upon which the above- mentioned (chapter VI., C) scale of quality in dreams- from confusion to clearness- is essentially independent. Those parts of the dream seem to us clear in which the secondary elaboration has been able to accomplish something; those seem confused where the powers of this performance have failed. Since the confused parts of the dream are often likewise those which are less vividly presented, we may conclude that the secondary dream-work is responsible also for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the individual dream-structures.
If I seek an object of comparison for the definitive formation of the dream, as it manifests itself with the assistance of normal thinking, I can think of none better than those mysterious inscriptions with which Die Fliegende Blatter has so long amused its readers. In a certain sentence which, for the sake of contrast, is in dialect, and whose significance is as scurrilous as possible, the reader is led to expect a Latin inscription. For this purpose the letters of the words are taken out of their syllabic groupings, and are rearranged. Here and there a genuine Latin word results; at other points, on the assumption that letters have been obliterated by weathering, or omitted, we allow ourselves to be deluded about the significance of certain isolated and meaningless letters. If we do not wish to be fooled we must give up looking for an inscription, must take the letters as they stand, and combine them, disregarding their arrangement, into words of our mother tongue.
The secondary elaboration is that factor of the dream-work which has been observed by most of the writers on dreams, and whose importance has been duly appreciated. Havelock Ellis gives an amusing allegorical description of its performances: “As a matter of fact, we might even imagine the sleeping consciousness as saying to itself: ‘Here comes our master, Waking Consciousness, who attaches such mighty importance to reason and logic and so forth. Quick! gather things up, put them in order- any order will do- before he enters to take possession.'” *
* The World of Dreams, pp. 10, 11 (London, 1911).
The identity of this mode of operation with that of waking thought is very clearly stated by Delacroix in his Sur la structure logique du reve (p. 526): “Cette fonction d’interpretation n’est pas particuliere au reve; c’est le meme travail de coordination logique que nous faisons sur nos sensations pendant la veille.” *
* This function of interpretation is not particular to the dream; it is the same work of logical coordination that we use on our sensations when awake.
J. Sully is of the same opinion; and so is Tobowolska: “Sur ces successions incoherentes d’hallucinations, l’esprit s’efforce de faire le meme travail de coordination logique qu’il fait pendant le veille sur les sensations. Il relie entre elles par un lien imaginaire toutes ces images decousues et bouche les ecarts trop grands qui se trouvaient entre elles” * (p. 93).
* With these series of incoherent hallucinations, the mind must do the same work of logical coordination that it does with the sensations when awake. With a bon of imagination, it reunites all the disconnected images, and fills in the gaps found which are too great.
Some authors maintain that this ordering and interpreting activity begins even in the dream and is continued in the waking state. Thus Paulhan (p. 547): “Cependant j’ai souvent pense qu’il pouvait y avoir une certain deformation, ou plutot reformation du reve dans le souvenir…. La tendence systematisante de l’imagination pourrait fort bien achever apres le reveil ce qu’elle a ebauche pendant le sommeil. De la sorte, la rapidite reelle de la pensee serait augmentee en apparence par les perfectionnements dus a l’imagination eveillee.” *
* However, I have often thought that there might be a certain deformation, or rather reformation, of the dream when it is recalled…. The systematizing tendency of the imagination can well finish, after waking, the sketch begun in sleep. In that way, the real speed of thought will be augmented in appearance by improvements due to the wakened imagination.
Leroy and Tobowolska (p. 502): “Dans le reve, au contraire, l’interpretation et la coordination se font non seulement a l’aide des donnees du reve, mais encore a l’aide de celles de la veille….” *
* In the dream, on the contrary, the interpretation and coordination are made not only with the aid of what is given by the dream, but also with what is given by the wakened mind.
It was therefore inevitable that this one recognized factor of dream-formation should be over-estimated, so that the whole process of creating the dream was attributed to it. This creative work was supposed to be accomplished at the moment of waking, as was assumed by Goblot, and with deeper conviction by Foucault, who attributed to waking thought the faculty of creating the dream out of the thoughts which emerged in sleep.
In respect to this conception, Leroy and Tobowolska express themselves as follows: “On a cru pouvoir placer le reve au moment du reveil et ils ont attribue a la pensee de la veille la fonction de construire le reve avec les images presentes dans la pensee du sommeil.” *
* It was thought that the dream could be placed at the moment of waking, and they attributed to the waking thoughts the function of constructing the dream from the images present in the sleeping thoughts.
Tertiary Elaboration
Spence
Narrative Truth
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic532256.files/spence-narrativetruth.pdf
The Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis: A View of the Contributions of Donald Spence, Roy Schafer, Robert Stolorow, Irwin Z. Hoffman and Beyond (Book Review)
Author : Moore, Richard
Publisher : Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1999
Reviewed By : Gemma Ainslie, Winter 2000, pp. 17-19
Richard Moore’s first book is a far-reaching engagement with one of the most critical issues in this psychoanalytic time. Exploring with great attention and a finely-honed integrative sensibility Freud’s position as well as those of four contemporary pillars of narrative psychoanalytic theorizing, Moore opens the readers eyes to problems with logic and consistency, implication and application, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, in each of them. He demonstrates extensive appreciation for the literature of our field – particularly, but not exclusively that of the last two decades – as well as a capacity to communicate clearly regarding its implications for our definitions of man and mind, and for clinical practice. It is rare that I find myself telling others so enthusiastically of a new authors work, and rarer still that I read each and every footnote with a concern that I might otherwise miss an interesting aside; I did both as I read The Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis.
Introducing his work as “…a psychoanalytic discussion about the relationship between subjectivity and external reality,” (p.1), Moore offers as a cultural context for his examination of this topic “…the recent spate of public interest about the authenticity of reported memories of childhood sexual abuse.” (p.4) As he clearly and succinctly describes each of four theorists’ position regarding truth, history,and reality, he circles back to trauma as the litmus for the explanatory power of each perspective. While initially I was engaged by this, it eventually came to feel like a reference point that diluted the arguments via taking them out of the consulting room, into another sphere with other experts whose opinions demanded other tests for truth. Nonetheless, as the critiques advance, Moore convincingly builds a case for the inescapable superiority of a narrative position, examines four representatives of such a position, engaging the reader in consideration of both finely articulated, familiar arguments and worthy, new commentary, and finally outlines his own constructivist psychoanalysis.
Moore escorts us through major contributions of Spence, Schafer, Stolorow, and Hoffman, positing that they constitute “a response to a deep and ongoing need to clarify the theoretical ground of psychoanalysis…”(p.45). He methodically organizes his comparative readings around five questions: What is the nature of reality? What is the nature of the human experience of reality? What is the nature of human communication of the experience of reality? What kind of knowledge can reasonably be acquired on the basis of information about the past acquired in a psychoanalytic session? What kind of action can reasonably be taken on the basis of such knowledge acquire in the psychoanalytic session? His examination is logical and thorough, his eye for internal inconsistency and contradiction is acute, and the critiques he offers are well-founded. Complementing his careful, reasoned approach to examining each theory is a remarkable capacity to characterize the content and impact of each of the four theorists’ work via metaphors. Like in an analysis, understanding Moore’s psychic reality with regard to the theories he examines can be approximated via tracing these metaphors, comparing them to one another as synthetic representations of his experience of each author’s work and of their relative merit, that is, by trying to find meanings both intentionally and unintentionally communicated. A few examples, I hope, will illustrate both his astute grasp of the evidence and the inevitable bias in his evaluation of these four authors. Here I proceed interpretively and cautiously, inviting Moore and other readers to respond, and bearing in mind Moore’s counsel regarding narrative perspectives: “Often…the additional construction added to constructed reality is probably slight…Usually, a cigar is just a cigar.”( p.138)
Having absolved us of our guilt regarding potentially destroying psychoanalysis via demythologizing Freud
“ while it is obvious that no statute of limitations pertains to unearthing flaws in Freud’s character, there must be some point in the development of a discipline when questions about its founder no longer bring the whole structure into doubt. The discovery of dishonesty in Darwin’s reports would pose little threat to modern zoology.” (p. 37) Moore begins by challenging Freud’s archeological metaphor: “Perhaps it is more as if Freud had found a method analogous to sonar to locate and provide a rough outline of buried memories and then help the patient (or himself) make a facsimile that seemed sufficiently familiar and could be worked with as though it were the original…With the archeological metaphor Freud seems to have confused his faith in an accurately recorded objective past (psychic and external) with his critically limited ability to contact it” (p. 33).
Next, he moves to his consideration of the narrativist revolution, seating Spence as the founding father: “Overall, Spence seems to have dropped a kind of depth charge into psychoanalysis from which neither he nor psychoanalysis is has been able to recover.” (p. 59) In his treatment of Schafer, I believe there is evidence of unconsidered bias. Moore at various points characterizes Schafer’s work as a “somewhat parochial narrative perspective” (p. 63) via which “(t)he search for coherence is revealed to be essentially a movement toward adherence.” (p. 72) and sums up by likening Schafer “to someone who, on discovering that there is no precious metal underlying the world’s currency, feels quite comfortable designing and printing his own.” (p. 124) Certainly, none of the four narrativists escapes Moore’s wit : Stolorow’s school, for example. is viewed as one in which “intersubjective theorists elevate their inferences by more or less pulling on their own subjective bootstraps and raising the inference to the level of truth.” (p. 94). Even Hoffman, clearly the narrative champ in Moore’s eyes, is scrutinized for fault: “His comments retain all the problems of positivism and add all the problems of relativism. In short, it is a positivism with very bad eyesight, and a relativism that keep bumping into objectively hard things.” (p. 107) However, Moore’s caricature of Schafer borders on that of a counterfeiter and I believe there is more of an idiosyncratically constructed and unexamined tone to his criticism of Schafer. Further, I wonder if Moore’s characterization of Hoffman’s work as “a psychoanalytic Talmud” (p. 124) is a default, as if Moore is not yet able to see beyond the transferential idealization that he refers us to later in his book: “Patients bring important aspects of the analyst’s authority with them…This source of the analyst’s authority is the tail of the tiger itself.” (p. 162) In effect, Moore is not able as yet to play with Hoffman’s ideas, to respond to them with an image via which he communicates his experience of Hoffman and thereby offers space enough for the reader to play. Especially from one so adept at metaphor and humor, this “speechlessness” is a communication.
In his final chapter, “In Search of a Constructivist Metapsychology,” Moore outlines his own theory of a constructed narrative truth, based in his belief that “how a given person creates (or constructs) his or her reality is…more important than any particular experiential example of that process.”(p. 135) He covers multiple questions in detail, although I experienced many sections as worthy of considerable expansion, particularly via comparison to other psychoanalytic perspectives. However, I choose to highlight two especially noteworthy central points here, sequencing and trauma.
In explicating a constructivist perspective, Moore centers his thinking on “the experience of sequence,” positing that “(t)he general configuration of this subjective process can be traced through three postulated stages of experience…the moment prior to experience, the moment of experience, and the moment after…Memory is previously constructed experience, can be experienced itself directly (as memory), and has the potential to be experienced in the future (in recall).” (p. 135) Both Winnicott and Bollas are used well to ground aspects of Moore’s formulation. Bollas’s “transformational object” especially offers a clear corollary to Moore’s moments of construction. I believe it fair to note the parallels to Freud’s psychoanalytic appreciation of the development of a sense of reality – that there is a contextualizing fantasy or anticipatory thought, followed by an experience of frustration or gratification followed by a memory and incremental structure. This pivotal point regarding sequencing certainly warrants examination as an entry into our theorizing and it also allows him to return again to issues of history and memory, in the now highlighted context that the experience of reality is created and that the narrative is for the benefit of the listener and inherently different from the already constructed reality of the narrator.
The application of Moore’s contructivist theory to trauma, too, has much to recommend it. Counter to other analytic positions, for example, that trauma results when overwhelming events match fantasies or that trauma destroys earlier benevolent internalizations and expectations, Moore posits that trauma destroys the capacity to construct: “Trauma can be seen not so much as constructed as an overwhelming, externally initiated interaction conducted largely despite existing psychological constructs. That which might otherwise be constructed overwhelms the construction process and therefore the constructor. … Potential reality overflows the capacity to construct it, and the result is not reality created by one’s experience, but a loss of one’s capacity to participate in it at all.” (p. 168)
This conceptualization both requires and appreciates the position of the analyst as Moore conceives of it: “…the constructivist analyst’s main claim to authority as an analyst lies in his or her openness to sharing in constructing the reality that the analyst and the patient inhabit together…The analyst, it is hoped, remains exemplary in the process to construct anew and provides a model and an experience of that process often not available elsewhere in the patients life.” (p. 161)
As well as the content of this rich book, Moore’s style is worthy of comment. He can logically proceed with the reading of a theoretical position with clarity and grace. However, he also employs metaphors masterfully, capturing nuances that a more academic tongue misses. Finally, Moore is wonderfully humorous at times – his dry and wry commentary surprisingly peppering the text in a way that enlivens it and him in the reader’s mind. I was drawn to this quality early on and therefore was amused to find the reference to Huizinga’s l950 Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture late in the book as if my reading of Moore had been “true.” Moore has found a playground in this work regarding reality: in a telephone conversation he referred this kind of theoretical work as “such a squiggley thing.” Indeed what better way is there of understanding our invitations to our analysands to dream with us.
Reviewer Note
Gemma Ainslie is in private practice in Austin TX, and is on the faculty of the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute. She serves on the Division 39 Board as a Member-at-large.
Copyright
© APA Div. 39 (Psychoanalysis) . All rights reserved. Readers therefore must apply the same principles of fair use to the works in this electronic archive that they would to a published, printed archive. These works may be read online, downloaded for personal or educational use, or the URL of a document (from this server) included in another electronic document. No other distribution or mirroring of the texts is allowed. The texts themselves may not be published commercially (in print or electronic form), edited, or otherwise altered without the permission of the Division of Psychoanalysis. All other interest and rights in the works, including but not limited to the right to grant or deny permission for further reproduction of the works, the right to use material from the works in subsequent works, and the right to redistribute the works by electronic means, are retained by the Division of Psychoanalysis. Direct inquiries to the chair of the Publications Committee .
Vaighinger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Vaihinger )
Hans Vaihinger (September 25, 1852 – December 18, 1933) was a German philosopher , best known as a Kant scholar and for his Philosophie des Als Ob (Philosophy of As If ), published in 1911, but written more than thirty years earlier. [3]
In Philosophie des Als Ob , he argued that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave “as if” the world matches our models. In particular, he used examples from the physical sciences, such as protons , electrons , and electromagnetic waves . None of these phenomena have been observed directly, but science pretends that they exist, and uses observations made on these assumptions to create new and better constructs.
Vaihinger admitted that he had several precursors, especially Jeremy Bentham ‘s Theory of Fictions . In the preface to the English edition of his work, Vaihinger expressed his Principle of Fictionalism . This is that “an idea whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is admitted is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity, may have great practical importance.”
This philosophy, though, is wider than just science. One can never be sure that the world will still exist tomorrow, but we usually assume that it does. Alfred Adler , the founder of Individual Psychology, was profoundly influenced by Vaihinger’s theory of useful fictions, incorporating the idea of psychological fictions into his personality construct of a fictional final goal .
Frank Kermode ‘s The Sense of an Ending (1967) was an early mention of Vaihinger as a useful methodologist of narrativity.
▪ 1902 Nietzsche Als Philosoph (Nietzsche as Philosopher )
7+-2
Magic number seven
Working memory is generally considered to have limited capacity. The earliest quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term memory was the “magical number seven ” introduced by Miller (1956). [3] He noticed that the memory span of young adults was around seven elements, called chunks , regardless whether the elements were digits, letters, words, or other units. Later research revealed that span does depend on the category of chunks used (e.g., span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around 5 for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, span is lower for long than for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud, and on the lexical status of the contents (i.e., whether the contents are words known to the person or not). [9] Several other factors also affect a person’s measured span, and therefore it is difficult to pin down the capacity of short-term or working memory to a number of chunks. Nonetheless, Cowan (2001) [10] has proposed that working memory has a capacity of about four chunks in young adults (and less in children and old adults).
McLuhan
Oh Boy!
(Ah Ha!)
Subtopic
…[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent. [44]
Subtopic
Quoting with approval an observation on the nature of the printed word from Prints and Visual Communication by William Ivins , McLuhan remarks:
In this passage [Ivins] not only notes the ingraining of lineal, sequential habits, but, even more important, points out the visual homogenizing of experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background. […] The technology and social effects of typography incline us to abstain from noting interplay and, as it were, “formal” causality, both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions and fosters a mentality that gradually resists any but a separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook. [45]
Subtopic
The satellite medium, McLuhan states, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which “ends ‘Nature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.” [69] All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions (“past times are pastimes”). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term global theater . It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater.
Quotes
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Affluence creates poverty.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Art is anything you can get away with.
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
Jokes are grievances.
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person’s car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
The medium is the message.
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
Subtopic
Neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Before the 1980s, interaction between neuroscience and cognitive science was scarce. [4] The term ‘cognitive neuroscience’ was coined by George Miller and Michael Gazzaniga [4] “in the back seat of a New York City taxi” [5] toward the end of the 1970s. Cognitive neuroscience began to integrate the newly laid theoretical ground in cognitive science, that emerged between the 1950s and 1960s, with approaches in experimental psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. (Neuroscience was not established as a unified discipline until 1971
Related WikiBooks
▪ wikibooks:Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
▪ Cognitive Neuroscience chapter of the Neuroscience WikiBook
Koestler
The Act of Creation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Act of Creation is a 1964 book by Arthur Koestler . It is a study of the processes of discovery , invention , imagination and creativity in humor , science , and the arts . It lays out Koestler’s attempt to develop an elaborate general theory of human creativity.
From describing and comparing many different examples of invention and discovery, Koestler concludes that they all share a common pattern which he terms “bisociation” – a blending of elements drawn from of two previously unrelated matrices of thought into a new matrix of meaning by way of a process involving comparison , abstraction and categorization , analogies and metaphors . He regards many different mental phenomena based on comparison (such as analogies, metaphors, parables , allegories , jokes , identification, role-playing, acting , personification , anthropomorphism etc.), as special cases of “bisociation”.
The concept of bisociation has been adopted, generalized and formalized by cognitive linguists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner , who developed it into conceptual blending theory [1] .
Book One: The Art of Discovery and the Discoveries of Art
The Act of Creation is divided into two books. In the first book, Koestler proposes a global theory of creative activity encompassing humor, scientific inquiry, and art. Koestler’s fundamental idea is that any creative act is a bisociation (not mere association ) of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought. [2] Employing a spatial metaphor, Koestler calls such frames of thought matrices : “any ability, habit, or skill, any pattern of ordered behaviour governed by a ‘code’ of fixed rules.” [3] Koestler argues that the diverse forms of human creativity all correspond to variations of his model of bisociation.
In jokes and humour , the audience is led to expect a certain outcome compatible with a particular matrix (e.g. the narrative storyline); a punch line, however, replaces the original matrix with an alternative to comic effect. The structure of a joke, then, is essentially that of bait-and-switch. In scientific inquiry , the two matrices are fused into a new larger synthesis. [4] The recognition that two previously disconnected matrices are compatible generates the experience of eureka . Finally, in the arts and in ritual , the two matrices are held in juxtaposition to one another. Observing art is a process of experiencing this juxtaposition, with both matrices sustained.
According to Koestler, many bisociative creative breakthroughs occur after a period of intense conscious effort directed at the creative goal or problem, in a period of relaxation when rational thought is abandoned, like during dreams and trances. [5] Koestler affirms that all creatures have the capacity for creative activity, frequently suppressed by the automatic routines of thought and behavior that dominate their lives.
[edit ]
Book Two: Habit and Originality
The second book of The Act of Creation aims to develop a biological and psychological foundation for the theory of creation proposed in book one. Koestler found the psychology of his day (behaviorism , cognitivism ) portraying man merely as an automaton, disregarding the creative abilities of the mind. Koestler draws on theories of play , imprinting , motivation , perception , Gestalt psychology , and others to lay a theoretical foundation for his theory of creativity.
Quotes
A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
A writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time.
Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.
The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
True creativity often starts where language ends.
Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/arthur_koestler.html#ixzz1iDBqyck4
Subtopic
Entropy
Identity
Process
Paranoia
Paranoia is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear , often to the point of irrationality and delusion . Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself. Historically, this characterization was used to describe any delusional state. In modern colloquial use, the term “paranoia” is sometimes misused to describe a phobia . [1] The general lack of blame in phobia disorders sharply differentiates the two.
Inflation
Some of our best minds have been taken from us by UFOs
Damon Knight Squeezed
Reich as an example
Ideas of Reference
Blackberries and iPhones are meant to help workers manage their workload by giving them access to messages and alerts while away from the office.
But people become so obsessive about checking their email accounts and social networking sites that they actually become more stressed as a result, researchers said.
Some are so hooked to their devices that they even begin to experience “phantom” vibrations where they mistakenly believe their phone is buzzing in their pocket, it was claimed.
The findings will be presented to the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology Conference in Chester today.
Researchers issued questionnaires and carried out psychometric stress tests on more than 100 volunteers including students and employees from a variety of professions including retail and the public sector.
Their results showed that people’s use of smart phones was linked to their levels of stress, but their line of work was not.
Stress was directly linked to the number of times people checked their phones on average, and people with the most extreme levels of stress were troubled by “phantom” vibrations when no message had been received, the survey showed.
Researchers said that in most cases people had acquired smart phones to help them keep on top of their work.
But after they began using the devices, the benefits they brought to the user’s workload were outweighed by a greater pressure for them to stay up to date with messages, emails and social networking sites.
This became a vicious cycle in which the more stressed people became, the more they compulsively felt the need to check their phone, the study showed.
Richard Balding of the University of Worcester, who led the research, said employers should seriously consider the burden that smart phones put on their workers.
He said: “Smart phone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking.
“Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, and reduce people’s temptation to check their devices.”
Paranoia
Apophenia
Voices
Pirandello
Works
“A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! And to be able to to live for ever you don’t need to have extraordinary gifts or be able to do miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Prospero? But they will live for ever because – living seeds – they had the luck to find a fruitful soil, an imagination which knew how to grow them and feed them, so that they will live for ever.” (from Six Characters in Search of an Author , 1921)
Memes?
After having a liaison with his cousin Linuccia, which his father did not approve, Pirandello started his career as a writer. “
Blessed is he who can stop halfway and before old age comes on can marry illusion and preserve it lovingly,” Pirandello wrote in 1887 in a letter of his future plans.
Pirandello had married in 1894 Antonietta Portulano, a fellow Sicilian and the daughter of his father’s business associate. She suffered mental breakdown in 1904. When her condition steadily worsened – she became insane with a jealous paranoia – the illness deeply influenced Pirandello’s writing. During World War I, both of Pirandello’s sons were captured as prisoners of war. After his wife’s illness got worse, Pirandello was forced to place her in 1919 in a mental institution.
COSI È (SE VI PARE) (Right You Are – If You Think You Are), published in 1918, marked Pirandello’s interest in the examination of the relativity of truth. The story was about a woman whose identity remains hidden and who could be one of the two very different people. SEI PERSONAGGI IN CERCA D’AUTORE (1921,
Six Chracters in Search of An Author) asked the question, can fictional characters be more authentic than real persons, and what is the relationship between imaginary characters and the writer, who has created them.
Six Characters in Search of an Author consists of roles-within-roles. In rehearsal preparations of a theatrical company are interrupted by the Father and his family who explain that they are characters from an unfinished dramatic works. They want to interpret again crucial moments of their lives, claiming that they are “truer” than the “real” characters. “How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself too. We think we understand each other: but we never do,” says the Father. He tells that he has helped his wife to start a new life with her lover and the three illegitimate children born to them. The Wife claims that he forced her into the arms of another man. The Stepdaughter accuses the Father for her shame – they met before in Mme Pace’s infamous house, and he did not recognize her. She was forced to turn to prostitution to support the family. The Son refuses to acknowledge his family and runs into the garden. He shots himself and the actors argue about whether the boy is dead or not. The Father insists that the events are real. The Producer says: “Make-believe?! Reality?! Oh, go to hell the lot of you! Lights! Lights! Lights!” and The Stepdaughter escapes into the audience laughing maniacally.
ENRICO IV (1922, Henry IV, known in the United States as The Living Mask), premiered in Milan, received much better reception. The play told about a man who has fallen from his horse during a masquerade and starts to believe he is the German emperor Henry IV. To accommodate his illness his wealthy sister has placed him in a medieval castle surrounded by actors dressed as eleventh-century courtiers. The nameless hero regains his sanity after twelve years, but decides to pretend he is mad.
With the trilogy Six Characters in Search of An Author , in which the characters of the title are called into existence by a writer, CIASCUNO A SUO MODO (1924) and QUESTA SERA SI RECITA A SOGGETO (1930), Pirandello revolutionized the modern theatrical techniques. A second trilogy, LA NUOVA COLONIA (1928), LAZZARRO (1929), and I GIGANTI DELLA MONTAGNA (1934, The Mountain Giants) moved from the limits of truth-telling to the reality outside of art. The Mountain Giants was left unfinished. It portrayed a magician, who lives in an abandoned villa. A theatrical company decides to perform at a celebration given by the ‘Giants of the Mountain’. The barbaric audience tears two of the actors to pieces and kills one of the directors of the company.
Pirandello once said: “I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory – a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.” (from Playwrights on Playwriting , ed. by Toby Cole, 1961) Pirandello’s central themes, the problem of identity, the ambiguity of truth and reality, has been compared to explorations of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg , but he also anticipated Beckett and Ionesco. One of the earliest formulations of his relativist position Pirandello presented in the essay ‘Art and Consciousness Today’ (1893), in which he argued that the old norms have crumbled and the idea of relativity deprives “almost altogether of the faculty for judgment.” A central concepts in his work is “naked mask”, referring our social roles and on the stage the dialectic relationship between the actor and the character portrayed. In Six Characters the father points out, that a fictional figure has a permanence that comes from an unchanging text, but a real-life person may well be “a nobody”. Pirandello did not only restrict his ideas to theatre acting, but noted in his novel SI GIRA (1915), that the film actor “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage, but also from himself.”
Pirandello’s greatest achievement is in his plays. He wrote a large number of dramas which were ublished, between 1918 and 1935, under the collective title of Maschere nude [Naked Masks ]. The title is programmatic. Pirandello is always preoccupied with the problem of identity. The self exists to him only in relation to others; it consists of changing facets that hide an inscrutable abyss. In a play like Cosí é (se vi pare) (1918) [Right You Are (If You Think You Are) ], two people hold contradictory notions about the identity of a third person. The protagonist in Vestire gli ignudi (1923) [To Clothe the Naked ] tries to establish her individuality by assuming various identities, which are successively stripped from her; she gradually realizes her true position in the social order and in the end dies «naked», without a social mask, in both her own and her friends’ eyes. Similarly in Enrico IV (1922) [Henry IV ] a man supposedly mad imagines that he is a medieval emperor, and his imagination and reality are strangely confused. The conflict between illusion and reality is central in La vita che ti diedi (1924) [The Life I Gave You ] in which Anna’s long-lost son returns home and contradicts her mental conception of him. However, his death resolves Anna’s conflict; she clings to illusion rather than to reality. The analysis and dissolution of a unified self are carried to an extreme in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921) [Six Characters in Search of An Author ] where the stage itself, the symbol of appearance versus reality, becomes the setting of the play.
The attitudes expressed in L’Umorismo [Humour ], an early essay (1908), are fundamental to all of Pirandello’s plays. His characters attempt to fulfil their self-seeking roles and are defeated by life itself which, always changing, enables them to see their perversity. This is Pirandello’s humour, an irony which arises from the contradictions inherent in life.
Pirandello’s art arises out of a climate of profound historical and cultural disappointment. The wound caused by the betrayal of Il Risorgimento was never definitively healed in the soul of the writer. He added to a sense of diffuse disillusionment in Italy at the end of the 19th century a southern disdain for the politics of the newly united Italy with regard to the problems of the south. Pirandello adapted the title of a discourse by F. Brunetière La Banqueroute de science to describe this attitude which he felt toward the Risorgimento: la bancarotta del patriottismo (The Bankruptcy of Patriotism). This is the phrase he used in his novel I Vecchi e i Giovani (The Old and the Young ) (1909–1913), a “populous and extremely bitter” novel which seems to signal a brusque halt in the author’s search into the individual conscience which he had begun in Il Fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal ).
In I Vecchi e I Giovani , Pirandello traces a vast historical fresco, which fits into an entire southern Italian tradition of writing, beginning with the Vicerè of De Roberto. The novel, set in Sicily during the period of the Fasci Siciliani, delineates the “failure… of three myths” (of the Risorgimento, of unity, of socialism), replacing them with a “hopeless emptiness… with no possibility of redemption.” But despite the well documented and obvious connections to a precise panorama of crisis, there is a clear impression that Pirandello’s discordance with reality was pre-existent. The profound discontent and malaise, the reasons for unhappiness lay within him, as is always the case “in every person of an introspective nature, that is in every person of a poetic nature”, according to Eugenio Montale , who was referring to himself. On the other hand, it is probably precisely the disagreement with reality that constitutes the true wealth of the artist who, because of his inability to adapt, must abandon the beaten paths in order to travel new and different or forgotten roads.
Animated by a furious need to clear away all false certitudes, Pirandello pitilessly dismantles every fictitious point of reference. This initial, resolute epoché opens up horizons of disconcerting restlessness; reality is seen as having no order and as being contradictory and unattainable. It evades any attempt at classification and systematically violates the obligatory nexus of cause and effect which, even while seeming to suffocate in an unbreakable concatenation the tiniest spark of freedom, permits us to know, to predict and therefore to dominate.
Already in Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa , it seems clear that nothing is predictable; on the contrary, anything and everything can happen. There are no secure anchors or objective facts which can be correlated with judgements and behaviour. What is a fact for Pirandello? Just an empty shell that can be refilled with a mutable meaning according to the moment and the prevailing sentiment. An irrelevant grain of sand can assume the crushing consistency of an avalanche that overwhelms. This is what happens to Marta Ajala, the protagonist of l’Esclusa , who, surprised by her husband in the awful act of reading a letter from a man, is thrown out of the house even though she has done nothing wrong. But she will be accepted and taken in again, and here lies the humoristic genius, only after she has actually done the deed which she was unjustly accused of committing in the first place.
The obscure will which dominates heavily in the first novel comes out into the open in Il Turno (1902), Pirandello’s second novel. Here it manifests itself as the irrational accident, careless and spiteful, which diverts itself by subverting all human plans or programs for the future. The expectations of Marcantonio Ravì are certainly not chimerical illusions; they represent the normal projection into the future of what has happened many times before and which is presumably going to happen again. His attractive daughter Stellina, thinks the wise Marcantonio, will sacrifice herself for a short time by marrying the old but wealthy Don Diego who, according to all common sense predictions, will die very soon. Stellina will then be filthy rich and can marry her true love, Pepè Alletto. Isn’t Marcantonio’s plan perfect? But, as everyone knows, sometimes things don’t quite go according to plan and, in this case, Don Diego, notwithstanding a bout of pneumonia, finds the strength to survive. However, the lawyer Ciro Coppa who after the annulment of the first hateful marriage became Stellina’s second husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Perhaps now it will finally be Pepé’s turn. But who can be sure? Reality is, at the profoundest level, unknowable; a secret law manages the great spectacle and often designs capricious circumvolutions of disconcerting coincidences which are certainly not explainable in the light of a deterministic vision of the universe. In this confusing labyrinth man questions himself about himself but makes the terrifying discovery of the uncertainty of his identity. The obscurity of external reality finds in this way, in a sort of ironic and upside down mysticism, a correlation in the dark interior which throws into crisis the very stability of the self.
Turning one’s eye inward toward one’s own consciousness means seeing with horror the threat of disintegration, of dis-aggregation of the self. In 1900, Pirandello had already read the short essay by Alfred Binet , Les altérations de la personnalité (1892) on the alterations of the personality. He cited several excerpts in his article Scienza e Critica Estetica . The experimental observations of Binet had apparently scientifically demonstrated the extreme lability of the personality: a set of psychic elements in temporary coordination which can easily collapse, giving way to many different personalities equally furnished with will and intelligence cohabiting within the same individual. In Binet’s “proofs”, Pirandello found scientific support for the surprising intuitions of much German romanticism on which he had probably meditated during his years spent in Germany. Steffens, Shubert and others who had concerned themselves with dreams were the first to discovery the existence of the subconscious. Steffens already spoke of a “consciousness which sinks into the night” and, in Jean Paul, there are already present the ideas of terror of disintegration and the chilling sensation of seeing oneself live. Pirandello shares the view that the self is not unitary. That which seemed like an irreducible and monolithic nucleus multiplies as in a prism; the exterior self does not have the same face as the secret self; it is only a mask that man unconsciously assumes in order to adapt himself to the social context in which he finds himself, each one in a different manner, in a game of mobile perspectives.
Compelled only by an interior sense of necessity, furnished with different instruments and aiming at other prospects, Pirandello ventures on his own initiative into territory which will later on end up in Freudian psychoanalysis and the analytic psychology of Carl Jung . Jung published his work The Self and the Unconscious in 1928. In that work, he attempts to scientifically investigate the relationship between the individual and the collective psyche, between the being that appears and the profound being. Jung called the self that appears a persona saying that “…the term is truly appropriate because originally persona was the mask that actors wore and also indicated the part that he played.” The persona is “that which one appears”, a facade behind which is hidden the true individual being.
It’s difficult not to be stunned and impressed by the wisdom of Pirandello who had been employing these concepts in his art from his very first novel. But within the genre of novels, it was with Mattia Pascal that Pirandello inaugurated the series of personages to whom he would assign the arduous task of searching for their own authenticity in this Heideggerian sense. But upon the emptiness left by his presumed death, in fact, Mattia quickly reconstructs another persona which, only apparently different from the first, in reality represents its grotesque double. Mattia’s voyages, without any precise destination or practical utility, can seem like the modern transcription of the great romantic theme of vagabondage. But Mattia has nothing in common with the joyous ne’er-do-well of Joseph von Eichendorff , who with the sole companionship of his violin abandons the paternal home and opens his ingenuous eyes on the transient spectacle of the world. And he has also has nothing of Knulp, the more modern vagabond of Hermann Hesse and other characters of this genre. He is not an innocent and ingenuous man freed from all the constrictions of society. His voyages are not joyous but filled with the acrid odours of train tracks and stations and they are an obsessive and inconclusive set of movements which in the end will bring him back fatally to the point of departure. The dissociation of Mattia from the bourgeoisie universe based on money and profit is manifested only in the vindictive exercise of his virility with the beautiful Oliva, the wife of the avid administrator Batta Malagna who had previously subtracted from him all of Mattia’s ownings. Oliva becomes pregnant and through a subtle game of subtractions and grotesque additions everyone is finally paid off.
This is not the eros of Klein, the protagonist of the short novel of Hesse , Klein and Wagner , published in 1920, which offers surprising analogies with Mattia Pascal . Klein, small and squallid bureaucrat, exactly like Mattia, runs away horrified from his own exterior persona in search of his more profound being. On the way, he encounters the ballerina Teresina and experiences the frankly sexual fascination of the blonde hair, of the confident and sharp gesticulations, of the tight stockings on her smooth, long legs. A shy reserve, on the other hand, keeps Mattia (and his author) far away from the powerful, disruptive force of Eros which is transformed into a sickly sweet attraction, smelling of talcum powder, for the bloodless Adriana, surprised in her nightgown in the home of Paleari.
Pirandello is an author who does not let himself be taken by surprise in the territories of the unconscious; his art is not an escape into the shadows nor does it represent a plane of direct conflict with man’s interior phantasms. His writing, although perfectly in line with so much of art at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, never drowns in dis-aggregation but lucidly transcribes it. The oneiric and hallucinatory atmophere of the paintings of O. Redon or of the designs of A. Kubin are completely foreign to Pirandello’s sensibility. In him, the unconscious does not have two aspects, a positive and a negative, one which can destroy and one which can save; the elixir of the devil can never become the nectar of the gods. This is why the carefully scrutinized interior monologues of so many characters (Mattia Pascal, Vitangelo Moscarda, Enrico IV, etc.) never becomes pure stream of consciousness as in Joyce ‘s Ulysses , but moves within the confines of a consciousness, humoristically recomposed only to register, disconcertedly but extremely lucidly, through the narrative, its own defeat. The pointed and painful writing assumes in this way the responsibility to represent the unique common thread of a precarious and compromised self.
Pirandello’s commitment as a narrator and dramatist revolves around the impossibility of liberation. And, at times, the narrative and dramatic structure itself emphasizes the burning defeat, reconnecting the starting points with the ending points in a sort of tragic merry-go-round. The character almost always exemplifies or lucidly denounces his defeat. In a Sicily which was permeated by cruel prejudices smelling of holy water transformed into an ashtray, anti-heroic characters, “poveri christi”, trace the graphic of solitude and of alienation. The author follows them into the entangled chaos with that “ruthless pity” which represents the ungrateful wealth of his humoristic vision in which pain and laughter, participation and detachment are mixed.
The novel Suo Marito (1911) signals a particularly important moment in the narrative production of Pirandello. The protagonist, Silvia Roncella, is a writer. With her, Pirandello intended to investigate the processes of artistic creation and the relations between art and life. The artist for Pirandello, who is very close to Schopenhauer in this, alienates himself completely from the normal relations between things and from the impulses of his individual personality (principium individuationis ) in order to grasp the essence beyond existence. Silvia is a true artist. In her, the creative activity is dictated exclusively by a natural “necessity”. Counterpoised to her stands her husband Giustino, who tries thousands of different avenues in order to ensure that his wife’s art receives concrete recognition (economic, of course, economic!). It is he who spends his time chatting with the actors while they stage his wife’s dramas, it is he who suggests, who stimulates, who establishes relations with critics and journalists. Without him perhaps no one would know of his wife and her artistic qualities. This small man is described by Pirandello with great vivacity in a mist of pity and disdain. Giustino is just made that way. He needs to bend everything, even the highest things, to the dimension of utility. Silvia is the absolute contrary; she is the voice of supremely disinterested artistic creation and experiences moments of pure contemplation when, forgetting herself, she becomes “the limpid eye of the world”.
The commingling, deliberately not amalgamated, of ancient and new, of lucid torments of reason and of desperate desires for immemorial resting places represents the characteristic cipher of this surprising author who certainly does not attenuate the contrasts and contradictions. The novel Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (1925) brings us into the world of the cinema, a world with which Pirandello had a contradictory and problematic relationship. Although he was fascinated by it, he condemned it as a mechanical degeneration of the creative activity of the artist. With the character Serafino Gubbio, film operator, Pirandello reflects on the ever more invasive role of science and technology. The insecurity of modern man, the multiplication of perspectives, the lack of a unique point of reference are due, in his view, to the failure of positivistic culture to respond to the ultimate needs and questions of man. Science has corrupted the ingenuous margins of religion and fractured the anthropocentric perspective, the source of security for man in the past. Man the measure of the universe, the free forger of his own destiny, who could make Pico della Mirandola exclaim proudly:
“What a divine thing is man!” is now only a “tiny worm” with the awareness of being such. And he is without doubt the most unhappy of creatures. The “brute”, in fact, only knows that which is necessary for him to live; man has in him something “superfluous”, because he posits for himself “the torment of certain problems destined to remain unresolved in this world,” as Stefano notes lucidly. Hence the superiority of man over other animals, for Pirandello, following in the tracks of Leopardi in the Operette Morali and the “sublime” Canto Notturno , is overwhelmed by hammering questions without response. In these times dominated by technology, however, the “superfluous” of man can be offered, in a sort of upside-down and ironic ecstasy, to an inanimate and cruel Moloch, as happens to Serafino who reaches the perfect state of indifference, adapting himself completely to the imperious mechanisms of the camera and becoming, at the end of the novel, completely mute, buried in an aseptic “silence of things”.
In this strange geography of shipwrecks, only one character, the extremely lucid Vitangelo Moscarda, protagonist of Pirandello’s last novel Uno, Nessuno e Centomila , comes close to a suffered authenticity. After the initial humoristic dislocation of the persona (everyone around him has formed a “Vitangelo” persona of his own but he will spitefully fracture these inconsistent masks), and with the complicity of a mirror, he seeks to surprise the face of his true interior self. But the mirror offers no guarantee of knowledge; the result is only a tragicomic doubling. In pages dominated by sharp tension, Pirandello designs the comic drama of the improbable knowledge of a self which, like Prometheus , continually changes and eludes all attempts to be grasped.
The alienation from oneself experienced by Italo Svevo through the various “accidents” of existence in the ironic Coscienza di Zeno becomes here a vertiginous immersion in the search for the profound self. Beyond the deforming exterior stratifications that, like the expressionist masks of George Grosz or Otto Dix , rigidify but do not express, the self, deprived of a nucleus, is entirely lost here and does not exist if not as transformation and mutability. Pirandello, in this novel, echoes David Hume ‘s view of the self as a bundle of transient sensations. The interior monologue of Vitangelo accompanies the phases of his search and his discovery with an interior commentary, extremely modern in style, surprisingly ductile in tone and in expressive register. Vitangelo, after having brought the crisis of the self without hesitation to its extreme consequences, in the final pages approaches liberation. He abandons every tie with reality. The path to authenticity must go through the itinerary of renunciation and of solitude. Finally liberated, Vitangelo feels in every way outside of himself. It is an experience which mystics know well. As Meister Eckhart expressed it: “As long as I am this or that, I am not all and I do not have all. Disconnect yourself, so that you no longer are, nor have, this or that and you will be everywhere… when you are neither this nor that, you are everything.” Vitangelo, not “accidentally”, but with a resurgent act of will, reduces the self to the sensation of feeling his own existence in the things around him. The self that remains is the profound self in perpetual transformation where there are no more barriers between interior and exterior: “This tree, I breathe shaking off the new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind; the book that I read, the wind that I drink. All outside, wayward.”
Quotes
I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.
Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.
Personally, I don’t give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, It Is So! (If You Think So
We’re like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Henry IV
Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you’ll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Each in His Own Way
You should show some respect for what other people see and feel, even though it be the exact opposite of what you see and feel.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, It Is So! (If You Think So)
Buffoons, buffoons! One can play any tune on them!
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Henry IV
The more arms and legs [children] we have, the richer we are.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Liolà
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Six Characters in Search of an Author
Facts
Examples
Socrates
Plato
Although Socrates —who was the main character in most of Plato ‘s dialogues—was a genuine historical figure, it is commonly understood that in later dialogues Plato used the character of Socrates to give voice to his own philosophical views. The Socratic problem refers to the difficulty or inability of determining what in Plato’s writings is an accurate portrayal of Socrates ‘ thought and what is the thought of Plato with Socrates as a literary device.
Socrates—who is often credited with founding western philosophy and who was put to death by the democracy of Athens in May 399 BC —was Plato’s teacher and mentor. Plato—like some of his contemporaries—wrote dialogues about his teacher. Most of what we know about Socrates comes from the writings of Plato; however, it is widely believed that very few if any of Plato’s dialogues can be verbatim accounts of conversations or unmediated representations of Socrates’ thought. Many of the dialogues seem to use Socrates as a device for Plato’s thought, and inconsistencies occasionally crop up between Plato and the other accounts of Socrates; for instance, Plato has Socrates constantly denying that he would ever accept money for teaching, while Xenophon ‘s Symposium clearly has Socrates stating that he is paid by students to teach wisdom and this is what he does for a living. Given the apparent evolution of thought in Plato’s dialogues from his early years to his middle and later years, it is often believed that the dialogues began to represent less of Socrates and more of Plato as time went on. However, the question of exactly what aspects of Plato’s dialogues are representative of Socrates and what are not is far from agreed upon.
Karl Popper treats the Socratic problem in his first book of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
The German classical scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher made an attempt to solve the “Socratic problem”. Schleiermacher maintains that the two dialogues Apology and Crito are purely Socratic, which is to say, rather accurate historical portrayals of the real man, Socrates, and hence history—and not Platonic philosophy at all. All of the other dialogues that Schleiermacher accepted as genuine, he considered to be integrally bound together and consistent in their Platonism. Their consistency is related to the three phases of Plato’s development:
1.Foundation works, culminating in Parmenides ;
2.Transitional works, culminating in two so-called families of dialogues, the first consisting of Sophist , Statesman and Symposium , and the second of Phaedo and Philebus ; and finally
3.Constructive works: Republic , Timaeus and Laws .
Schleiermacher’s views as to the chronology of Plato’s work are rather controversial. In Schleiermacher’s view, the character of Socrates evolves over time into the “Stranger” in Plato’s work, and fulfills a critical function in Plato’s development as he appears in the first family above as the “Eleatic Stranger” in Sophist and Statesman , and the “Manitenean Stranger” in the Symposium . The “Athenian Stranger” is the main character of Plato’s Laws . Further, the Sophist–Statesman–Philosopher family makes particularly good sense in this order, as Schleiermacher also maintains that the two dialogues, Symposium and Phaedo show Socrates as the quintessential philosopher in life (guided by Diotima ) and into death, the realm of otherness. Thus the triad announced both in the Sophist and in the Statesman is completed, though the Philosopher, being divided dialectically into a “Stranger” portion and a “Socrates” portion, isn’t called “The Philosopher”—this philosophical crux is left to the reader to determine. Schleiermacher thus takes the position that the real Socratic problem is understanding the dialectic between the figures of the “Stranger” and “Socrates.”
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Quotes
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Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. PLATO, Ion A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine. An honest man is always a child. As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent. Be as you wish to seem. Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant. Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind. Beware the barrenness of a busy life. Get Special Offers on Navigator. Experience the Luxury of Lincoln. By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher. Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate. He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy. He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature. I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance. Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/socrates.html#ixzz1iDF21Ubv I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing. I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good. I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live. If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it. If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart. It is not living that matters, but living rightly. Let him that would move the world first move himself. My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher. Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued. Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior. Check Out Our 2011 Car Inventory. Visit a Lincoln Mercury Dealer Now. One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him. Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us. The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him. The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods. The unexamined life is not worth living. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge. Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/socrates_2.html#ixzz1iDFHN8o5 True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence. Wisdom begins in wonder. Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live. Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/socrates_3.html#ixzz1iDFOfvBO |
Reich
Character
Reich’s Character Analysis was a major step in the development of what today is called ego psychology . In Reich’s view, a person’s entire character, not only individual symptoms, could be looked at and treated as a neurotic phenomenon.
Character and Personality Disorder
The book also introduced his theory of body armoring. Reich argued that unreleased psycho-sexual energy could produce actual physical blocks within muscles and organs , and that these blocks act as a body armor preventing the release of the energy. An orgasm was one way to break through the armor.
Armor
He would press hard on their “body armor”, his thumb or the palm of his hand pressing on their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity. [30] He wanted to see their movements soften, their breathing ease. This dissolution of the “body armor” also brought back the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression, he wrote.
Freud and aberration and early use of hypnosis
If the session worked as intended, he wrote that he could see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, a series of spontaneous, involuntary movements. Reich called these the “orgasm reflex”. The two goals of Reichian therapy became the attainment of this orgasm reflex during therapy, and orgastic potency during intercourse . Reich called the flow of energy that he said he observed in his patients’ bodies “bio-electricity” and considered calling his therapy “orgasmotherapy” but thought better of it for political reasons. [31]
Bion
Bion experiments
From 1934-39, Reich conducted experiments looking at vegetative energy in the body, especially the Galvanic skin response , which became research into the origins of life. These he called the “Bion Experiments”. He examined protozoa , single-celled creatures with nuclei . He grew cultured vesicles using grass, sand, iron, and animal tissue, boiling them, and adding potassium and gelatin . Having heated the materials to incandescence with a heat-torch, he noted bright, glowing, blue vesicles, which, he said, could be cultured, and which gave off an observable radiant energy. He named the vesicles “bions” and believed they were a rudimentary form of life, halfway between life and non-life. When he poured the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born, he said, dismissing the idea that the bacteria were already present in the air or on other materials. [26]
[edit ]
T-bacilli
In 1936, Reich wrote that “[s]ince everything is antithetically arranged, there must be two different types of single-celled organisms : (a) life-destroying organisms or organisms that form through organic decay, (b) life-promoting organisms that form from inorganic material that comes to life.” [27] This idea of spontaneous generation led him to believe he had found the cause of cancer. He called the life-destroying organisms “T-bacilli,” with the T standing for Tot , German for death. He described in The Cancer Biopathy how he had found them in a culture of rotting cancerous tissue obtained from a local hospital. He wrote that T-bacilli were formed from the disintegration of protein ; they were 0.2 to 0.5 micrometer in length, shaped like lancets, and when injected into mice, they caused inflammation and cancer. He concluded that, when orgone energy diminishes in cells through aging or injury, the cells undergo “bionous degeneration,” or death. At some point, the deadly T-bacilli start to form in the cells. Death from cancer, he believed, was caused by an overwhelming growth of the T-bacilli.
Orgonomy
Orgonomy
Main article: Orgone
Further information: Animism , Ether (classical element) , Ether theories , Energy (esotericism) , and Vitalism
Freud had argued for the existence of a sexual energy which he called “libido “, which he initially described as “something which is capable of increase, decrease, displacement and discharge, and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body”. But by 1925 Freud had rejected the idea that the libido represented a physical energy. [19] Reich took the idea further, arguing that he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy. He called it “orgone”, and the study of it “orgonomy”.
Orgone is blue in color, he wrote, omnipresent , visible to the naked eye, and responsible for such things as weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality. Reich argued that St. Elmo’s Fire is a manifestation of it, as is the blue color of sexually excited frogs. Red corpuscles , plant chlorophyll , gonadal cells, protozoa , and cancer cells are all charged with orgone, he said. [23]
He argued that humankind had previously split its knowledge of orgone in two: “ether” for its mechanistic, physical aspects, and “God” for the spiritual, the subjective. [43] He wrote that “God-Father is the basic cosmic energy from which all being stems, and which streams through (the) body as through anything else in existence.” [44]
[edit ]
Orgone accumulators
In 1940, he built boxes called “orgone accumulators” to concentrate atmospheric orgone. Some of the boxes were for lab animals, and some were large enough for a human being to sit inside. Composed of alternating layers of ferrous metals and organic insulators with a high dielectric constant , the accumulators had the appearance of a large, hollow capacitor . Based on experiments with them, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively- entropic force in nature responsible for concentrating and organizing matter. The construction of the boxes caught the attention of the press, leading to wild rumors that they were “sex boxes” that caused uncontrollable erections . [24]
Cloudbuster
Reich posited a conjugate, life-annulling energy in opposition to orgone, which he dubbed Deadly Orgone Radiation or DOR. He wrote that accumulations of DOR played a role in desertification , and he designed a “cloudbuster ” with which he said he could manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse. It was a set of hollow metal pipes and cables inserted into water, which Reich argued created a stronger orgone energy field than was in the atmosphere, the water drawing the atmospheric orgone through the pipes. [19]
Reich conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster [ , calling the research “Cosmic Orgone Engineering.” In 1953, a drought threatened Maine’s blueberry crop, and several farmers offered to pay Reich if he could make it rain. The weather bureau had reportedly forecast no rain for several days when Reich began the experiment at 10 a.m. on July 6, 1953. The Bangor Daily News reported on July 24:
Dr. Reich and three assistants set up their “rain-making” device off the shore of Grand Lake, near the Bangor hydro-electric dam … The device, a set of hollow tubes, suspended over a small cylinder, connected by a cable, conducted a “drawing” operation for about an hour and ten minutes …
According to a reliable source in Ellsworth the following climactic changes took place in that city on the night of July 6 and the early morning of July 7: “Rain began to fall shortly after ten o’clock Monday evening, first as a drizzle and then by midnight as a gentle, steady rain. Rain continued throughout the night, and a rainfall of 0.24 inches was recorded in Ellsworth the following morning.”
A puzzled witness to the “rain-making” process said: “The queerest looking clouds you ever saw began to form soon after they got the thing rolling.” And later the same witness said the scientists were able to change the course of the wind by manipulation of the device. [48]
Cloudbusters drew UFOs
UFOs
Peter Robbins Presents ‘Orgone Energy, Wilhelm Reich and UFOs’ (from the 15th Annual International UFO Congress Convention & Film Festival) Peter Robbins has been involved in UFO studies for more than 25 years, as a researcher, investigator, writer, lecturer, activist and author.
<embed id=VideoPlayback src=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=7602609578301856050&hl=en&fs=true style=width:400px;height:326px allowFullScreen=true allowScriptAccess=always type=application/x-shockwave-flash> </embed>
Quotes
Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been, and will continue to be, life’s pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.
Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it.
Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
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Kosinski
Life
According to Eliot Weinberger , an American writer, essayist , editor and translator , Kosiński was not the author of The Painted Bird . Weinberger alleged in his 2000 book Karmic Traces that Kosiński was not fluent in English at the time of its writing. [16]
In a review of Jerzy Kosiński: A Biography by James Park Sloan, D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University wrote “For years Kosinski passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own experience during the Holocaust. Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin , to whom Kosinski confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences. Upon accepting the book for publication Santillana said, “It is my understanding that, fictional as the material may sound, it is straight autobiography.” Although he backed away from this claim, Kosinski never wholly disavowed it.” [17]
M. A. Orthofer addressed Weinberger’s assertion by saying: “Kosinski was, in many respects, a fake – possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them – as is the case with Kosinski.) Kosinski famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn’t (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right.” [18]
Kosiński himself addressed these claims in the introduction to the 1976 reissue of The Painted Bird , saying that “Well-intentioned writers critics, and readers sought facts to back up their claims that the novel was autobiographical. They wanted to cast me in the role of spokesman for my generation, especially for those who had survived the war; but for me survival was an individual action that earned the survivor the right to speak only for himself. Facts about my life and my origins, I felt, should not be used to test the book’s authenticity, any more than they should be used to encourage readers to read The Painted Bird . Furthermore, I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are very different modes.” [19]
Work
The Painted Bird
The Painted Bird , Kosiński’s controversial 1965 novel, is a fictional account that depicts the personal experiences of a boy of unknown religious and ethnic background who wanders around unidentified areas of Eastern Europe during World War II and taking refuge among a series of people, many of whom are brutally cruel and abusive, either to him or to others.
Soon after the book was published in the US, Kosiński was accused by the then-Communist Polish government of being anti-Polish , especially following the regime’s 1968 anti-Semitic campaign . [8] The book was banned in Poland from its initial publication until the fall of the Communist government in 1989. When it was finally printed, thousands of Poles in Warsaw lined up for as long as eight hours to purchase copies of the work autographed by Kosiński. [8] Polish literary critic and University of Warsaw professor Paweł Dudziak remarked that “in spite of the unclear role of its author,The Painted Bird is an achievement in English literature.” He stressed that since the book is a work of fiction and does not document real-world events, accusations of anti-Polish sentiment may result only from taking it too literally. [9]
The book received recommendations from Elie Wiesel who wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it was “one of the best… Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity.” Richard Kluger , reviewing it for Harper’s Magazine wrote: “Extraordinary… literally staggering … one of the most powerful books I have ever read.” Jonathon Yardley , reviewing it for The Miami Herald , wrote: “Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird . A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will forget it; no one who reads it will be unmoved by it.” [10]
However, reception of the book was not uniformly positive. After being translated into Polish, it was read by the people with whom the Lewinkopf family lived during the war. They recognized names of Jewish children sheltered by them (who also survived the war), depicted in the novel as victims of abuse by characters based on them. [11] Also, according to Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski , The Painted Bird was Kosiński’s most successful attempt at profiteering from the Holocaust by maintaining an aura of a chronicle. [11] In addition, several claims that Kosiński committed plagiarism in writing The Painted Bird were leveled against him. (See ‘Criticism’ section, below.)
[edit ]
Being There
One of Kosiński’s most significant works is Being There (1971), a satiric look at the unreality of America’s media culture. It is the story of Chance the gardener, a man without many defining qualities who emerges from nowhere and suddenly becomes the heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon and a presidential policy adviser. His simple and straightforward responses to popular concerns are praised as visionary despite no one really understanding what he is really saying. Many questions surround his mysterious origins, and filling in the blanks in his background proves impossible.
[edit ]
Criticism
According to Eliot Weinberger , an American writer, essayist , editor and translator , Kosiński was not the author of The Painted Bird . Weinberger alleged in his 2000 book Karmic Traces that Kosiński was not fluent in English at the time of its writing. [16]
In a review of Jerzy Kosiński: A Biography by James Park Sloan, D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University wrote “For years Kosinski passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own experience during the Holocaust. Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin , to whom Kosinski confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences. Upon accepting the book for publication Santillana said, “It is my understanding that, fictional as the material may sound, it is straight autobiography.” Although he backed away from this claim, Kosinski never wholly disavowed it.” [17]
M. A. Orthofer addressed Weinberger’s assertion by saying: “Kosinski was, in many respects, a fake – possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them – as is the case with Kosinski.) Kosinski famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn’t (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right.” [18]
Kosiński himself addressed these claims in the introduction to the 1976 reissue of The Painted Bird , saying that “Well-intentioned writers critics, and readers sought facts to back up their claims that the novel was autobiographical. They wanted to cast me in the role of spokesman for my generation, especially for those who had survived the war; but for me survival was an individual action that earned the survivor the right to speak only for himself. Facts about my life and my origins, I felt, should not be used to test the book’s authenticity, any more than they should be used to encourage readers to read The Painted Bird . Furthermore, I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are very different modes.” [19]
[edit ]
Plagiarism allegations
In June 1982, a Village Voice report by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith accused Kosiński of plagiarism , claiming that much of his work was derivative of prewar books unfamiliar to English readers, and that Being There was a plagiarism of Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy — The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma — a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz . They also alleged Kosiński wrote The Painted Bird in Polish, and had it secretly translated into English. The report claimed that Kosiński’s books had actually been ghost-written by “assistant editors”, finding stylistic differences among Kosiński’s novels. Kosiński, according to them, had depended upon his free-lance editors for “the sort of composition that we usually call writing.” American biographer James Sloan notes that New York poet, publisher and translator, George Reavey , claimed to have written The Painted Bird for Kosiński. [20]
The article found a more realistic picture of Kosiński’s life during the Holocaust — a view which was supported by biographers Joanna Siedlecka and Sloan. The article asserted that The Painted Bird, assumed by some to be semi-autobiographical , was largely a work of fiction. The information showed that rather than wandering the Polish countryside, as his fictional character did, Kosiński spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family.
Terence Blacker , a profitable English publisher (who helped publish Kosiński’s books) and author of children’s books and mysteries for adults, wrote in his article published in The Independent in 2002:
“The significant point about Jerzy Kosiński was that … his books … had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty’s Reds . He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect. All in all, he was a perfect candidate for the snarling pack of literary hangers-on to turn on. There is something about a storyteller becoming rich and having a reasonably full private life that has a powerful potential to irritate so that, when things go wrong, it causes a very special kind of joy.” [21]
D.G. Myers responded to Blacker’s assertions in his review of Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography by James Park Sloan:
“This theory explains much: the reckless driving, the abuse of small dogs, the thirst for fame, the fabrication of personal experience, the secretiveness about how he wrote, the denial of his Jewish identity. ‘There was a hollow space at the center of Kosinski that had resulted from denying his past,’ Sloan writes, ‘and his whole life had become a race to fill in that hollow space before it caused him to implode, collapsing inward upon himself like a burnt-out star.’ On this theory, Kosinski emerges as a classic borderline personality, frantically defending himself against… all-out psychosis. [17]
Journalist John Corry , wrote a 6,000-word feature article in The New York Times in November 1982, responding and defending Kosiński, which appeared on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. Among other things, Corry alleged that reports claiming that “Kosinski was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation campaign.” [22]
Kosiński himself responded that he had never maintained that the book was autobiographical, even though years earlier he confided to Houghton Mifflin editor Santillana that his manuscript “draws upon a childhood spent, by the casual chances of war, in the remotest villages of Eastern Europe .” [17] In 1988, he wrote The Hermit of 69th Street , in which he sought to demonstrate the absurdity of investigating prior work by inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book. [23] “Ironically,” wrote theatre critic Lucy Komisar, “possibly his only true book… about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud.” [23]
Despite repudiation of the Village Voice allegations in detailed articles in The New York Times , The Los Angeles Times , and other publications, Kosiński remained tainted. “I think it contributed to his death,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski , a friend and fellow Polish exile. [3]
[edit ]
TV, radio, film, and newspaper appearances
Kosiński appeared 12 times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson during 1971–73, and The Dick Cavett Show in 1974, was a guest on the talk radio show of Long John Nebel , posed half-naked for a cover photograph by Annie Leibovitz for The New York Times Magazine in 1982, and presented the Oscar for screenwriting in 1982.
He also played the role of Bolshevik revolutionary and Politburo member Grigory Zinoviev in Warren Beatty ‘s film Reds . The Time magazine critic wrote: “As Reed’s Soviet nemesis, novelist Jerzy Kosinski acquits himself nicely–a tundra of ice against Reed’s all-American fire.” Newsweek complimented Kosinski’s “delightfully abrasive” performance.
[edit ]
Kosiński was also friends with Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger . He introduced the couple.
In 1984, Polanski denied Kosinski’s story in his autobiography. Journalist John Taylor of New York Magazine believes Polanski was mistaken. “Although it was a single sentence in a 461-page book, reviewers focused on it. But the accusation was untrue: Jerzy and Kiki had been invited to stay with Tate the night of the Manson murders, and they missed being killed as well only because they stopped in New York en route from Paris because their luggage had been misdirected.” The reason why Taylor believes this, is that “a friend of Kosinski’s wrote a letter to the Times , which was published in the Book Review , describing the detailed plans he and Jerzy had made to meet that weekend at Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. Few people saw the letter.” The NYM article does not contain the name of this friend, nor the particular issue of the Book Review in which this letter is supposed to have been published, nor names of the ‘few’ who may have read the letter. [3]
[edit ]
Quotes
A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.
A trait which differentiated New York from European cities was the incredible freedom and ease in which life, including sexual life, could be carried on, on many levels.
And really the purpose of art – for me, fiction – is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.
As I go to sleep I remember what my father said-that one can never be sure if one will awake. The way my health is now, this is becoming more and more real.
Banks introduced the installment plan. The disappearance of cash and the coming of the credit card changed the shape of life in the United States.
Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer’s life.
Going around under an umbrella interferes with one’s looking up at the sky.
Homelessness is a part of our American system. There should be nothing wrong with this condition as long as the individual is not sentenced to unnecessary suffering and punishment.
I am inspired by human sexuality. The act itself is mechanical and holds little interest to me.
I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.
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I collect human relationships very much the way others collect fine art.
I do like to live in other people’s homes. I enjoy being a guest. I am an inexpensive guest. When one lives in another’s home he can enter into the psychic kingdom of that person.
I do not gather things, I prefer to rent them rather than to possess them.
I don’t fret over lost time – I can always use the situations in a novel.
I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening.
I write for a certain sphere of readers in the United States who on average watch seven and a half hours of multichannel television per day.
If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one.
In London, the weather would affect me negatively. I react strongly to light. If it is cloudy and raining, there are clouds and rain in my soul.
In my photographs it is apparent that there was no posing at the moment I released the shutter.
It is not sex by itself that interests me, but its particular role in American consciousness, and in my own life.
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It is possible to stand around with a cocktail in one’s hand and talk with everyone, which means with no one.
Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.
Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership.
Physical comfort has nothing to do with any other comfort.
Take a look at the books other people have in their homes.
The planned sit-down reception is an artificial forum where one is presented with a limited number of persons with whom he can hold a conversation.
The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.
The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.
There are many types of participation. One can observe so intensely that one becomes part of the action, but without being an active participant.
Get Special Offers on Navigator. Experience the Luxury of Lincoln.
There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital.
Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time.
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Main Topic
Research
Wikipedia
Evernote
Dreamweaver
( Angels thinking)
they escaped into flying saucer hubris
music of the spheres
each loop consisting of self-contained screens
several loops each with their own topic
preverbal verbalization
listening with the third mind
elaborating with the third ear
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
elaboration precedes history
will-self?
elaboration precedes narration
elaboration precedes consciousness
the synthetic function
paraphrase without “quotes”
paranoia as over-elaboration
consciousness comes from others
our perceptions change our minds
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
Dear Prudence, I am having difficulty fixing a significantly slowed Mac Air and my blood pressure continues to spike. Any advice?
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print as the content not the media
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. M. M.
the user is the content. M.M.
amzn.com/k/2JH2Q6C2WP1CJ #Kindle #iPad
amzn.com/k/2PCASYE94BIS2 #Kindle #iPad
from enactment to elaboration
ah-ha
tweeting in time
Mediated Elaborations
aphorisms as evolved memes
elaboration as a fictionalizing process
programming the canvas
Vannevar Bush
Pale Fire
A Database of Aphorisms
aphorism
could some of not remembering be not attending?
text is self-documenting
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
the evolutionary development of the self
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
formulation through publication
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
perception through neurology
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
ha!-information is physical
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
“time itself depends on chance”
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
defensively transferential
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
we don’t enter cyberspace, cyberspace enters us
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
the encroaching cognitive singularity
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
sustained attention as filtered residue
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
filtering as impulse control
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
I suspect that his “oh boy”s were really “ohboy”s
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
after McLuhan’s last stroke all he could say was “oh boy” and really mean it — (check for accuracy)
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
a neuropoetic analysis of McLuhan
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
as is free association
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
free will is anal retentive
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
Both Kosinski and Kaufman failed at the double nihilism
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
get him to verbalize his anger until you understand it
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
doesn’t make much difference to a database which form it’s content is in
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
use of unpublish to add time
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
if you code it right the book will write itself
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
and now I’m simply writing
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
i’m writing code for a digital book
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
we got words who needs sentences
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
an avatar emergent
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
humor and the observing ego
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
an upgraded Turning-type test is when you can’t tell your dog from a robot
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
a new type of literacy
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaborating an avatar between tweets
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
embedded apple
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
publishing the self
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
from group to swarm then back again
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
ego boundaries within the net
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
psychodynamics of the singularity
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
tweeting torpedoes
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
a database-generated narrative
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
recreate the rich sandbox provided by Schafer’s Analytic Attitude and envisioned in The Psychotherapeutic Use of Cyberspace
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
a database containing all the necessary props and structures for the storyteller/participant
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
Kosinski with a cam
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
pasting together the pieces that Bill left behind
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
object relations project into psychic space
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
deconstruction and reverse engineering
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
dogs look with their eyes but see with their noses
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
bye GameStop
I need say nothing, only exhibit.
to talk nonsense in your own way is a damn sight better than talking sense in someone else’s … –Dostoevsky
said with tongue in tweet
thinking in tweets
angels’ thoughts are difficult to contain
angel thinking is done in the cloud
believing is seeing
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
the new paranoia: projection into cyberspace
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
paranoia: over reaching out reach
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaboration and pattern recognizion
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
the emotional concomitants of the coming singularity
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
using one’s endorphins self-destructively
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaboration as focused attention
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaboration and memes
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaboration as involved in memory consolidation
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaboration elicits consolidation
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
post tramatic stress syndrome as it relates to other psycholgical syndromes centered around anxiety and mood
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
dreams as enactments
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
lila as the enactment of gods
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaborative aggregation
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
enactment as lila
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
a weakness in facial recognition ability might handicap the development of social skills.
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
the o in bion
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
consciousness as a product of double nihilism
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
plato inflated socrates
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
socrates blamed aristophanes
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
mediation is central in computer communications
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
elaboration at the center of projective testing
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
the teacher’s job is prepare you to be ready
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
the thoughts are already there; you only need to be ready to think them
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
secondary elaboration gives meaning to a dream
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
double nihilise the countertransference
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
channeling angelsthinking
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
“80 percent of feeling good is looking good” — Hair for Men
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
context over content
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
from filters to elaboration
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
meandering
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
mediating words and sentences so that the paragraphs can take care of themselves
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
who is watching whom
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
Synchronization shown in functional brain images of audience watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. http://bit.ly/4LSrEt
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
from prototype to implementation
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
unpublish
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
from enactment to double nihilism
angelsthinking Ken Diamond
this is not for you
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the ontology of object relations in narratives such as Pale Fire or The Vatican Cellars
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hierarchy:narrative::
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the selfish gene and the emptiness of attachment
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meat-puppet as an avatar — coming from you in the sky
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a large part of perception is based on faith
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Velmans: It is only when I hear what I say that I know what I think
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situations/enviroments are constructioned with restraints/containment
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in video gaming the narrative should advance through enviromental shaping
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enactment is acting in
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Helen Deutsch and Hans Vaihinger
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self-organizing intentions
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to make computers more “personable” we would have to change
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absent-minded but lost on thought?
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publishing with my right thumb
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late de Kooning — an artist through dementia
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thinking enactments in the mind
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we would much rather know about ourselves than be ourselves
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the capture and delivery of thinking
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both photos and phone calls capture the soul and make it available to the devil
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transference and the avatar
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the narrative is in the elaboration
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the gravity of narrative
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engagement through elaboration
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the media as the database’s frontend
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a database of phrases
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writing in the waiting room
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length, depth, time
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my name is zeke
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computer mediated communication
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evolutionary psychodynamics
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fear of death as an instance of annihilation anxiety
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the elaborations are added by others
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the thought before the elaborations take hold
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thought through tweet
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thinking through tweets
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need to work on pacing
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how far away are they
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tweets from the underground
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the sense of self grows out of attempts to overcome annihilation
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dear diary,
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intensity as merely content
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the connection between annihilation fear and attachment
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manic attempts to overcome annihilation
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sublimation as a productive means of overcoming annihilation
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many anxieties and depressive symptoms can be traced back to fears of annihilation
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annihilation anxiety and death
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coming into focus
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one thought at a time
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self-destructive behavior as a defense against annihilation anxiety
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url as a grammar of thinking
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tweets as publishing thinking in time
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launch publication from the web
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thinking about the relationship between self and consciousness
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emotions as the center of the self
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program a publication
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feel an emotion… think a thought
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intersubjectivity of emotions and thoughts
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thinking as an enactment of emotion
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feeling emotion
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thinking as an elaboration of emotions
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thinking as the medium of emotions
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word streaming
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deep packet sniffers
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words as a medium of thought
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do angels think in words
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with words as substance
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an avatar of thinking
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unfolding an avatar
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dear diary
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there’ a word I’m afraid to name …. first time i can remember that
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words the new sentences
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what and where you are thinking within a cognitive architecture
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a tweet application as a cognitive architecture
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tweets as thinking aloud
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angels start laughing after they are through thinking
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when my network starts flaking … so do I.
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three e
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unfolding
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working through enactment towards understanding
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thought as stunted enactment
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transference as the enactment of fantasy
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transference enactment narrative
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nonviolence
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get the story here
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from Iran: the first cyberwar
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what happened to persiankiwi?
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a vocabulary to replace sentences
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phrases without sentences
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lean phrases without prepositions
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new sentences for the new books
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can it be contained?!!
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object relations in Iranian political enactment
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#iranelection as an unfolding political self-organizing narrative
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publish or perish
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pointillism
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the cognitive architecture of cyberspace
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pirandello
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what’s the matter?
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intersubjectivity
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enacting self-organizing narratives
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self-organizing personalities
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twisty little passages
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words as things
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afterwords
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torpedo
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party
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the cocktail effect
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open it only when you need a draft
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words, words, words
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cathexis smells territortorial
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thoughts as remaining cathected even once out there
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emotions as taking place out there
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the soul in words
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spoken words as transitional objects
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jerzy kosinski’s identity games
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if all else fails I could become a fictional character
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awareness without consciousness
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the singularity meme
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Upon waking the mode of thinking doesn’t change as much as its field
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a game is mediated play
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elaborate relationship between dialogue and enactment
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transference as tertiary elaboration
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reverse engineering of the psychodynamic process
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Projective publishing
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If a new result is to have any value, it must unite elements long since known, but till then scattered — Poincare
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self-organizing avatars
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will a character consolidate around my tweets?
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the similarities between Identity and thought
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I am missing, therefore I am ___
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throw in out there and see what comes back
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but when will the personality break out?
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frustration tolerance is to emotion as attention is to thought
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Robert Solomon describes emotions as taking place out there
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listening to little feat
narrative truth and historical truth
an app as a cognitive architecture
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reproducing one tweet
media as the new books?
My Twitter picture came from Google. I intend to alter it one pixel at a time to look more like me.
how necessary is it to explicitly cite in tweets?…
there are thoughts that I am not ready to think of yet…
»
Do Angels Contain?
Bion on how to Contain an Angel’s thoughts…
… there is a close relation between the inner word in man and the language of angels.
thinking about mirror neurons
the language of angels is like a nod
Thinking of Angels
