Julian Gough

There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog.  I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...

I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)

Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)

By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet:

“I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
-W. H. Auden

If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.

 

The really rather terrifically wonderful Susie Maguire just sent me a nice picture of me sitting down in Dubrovnik. I won't explain what the heck I am doing, or why I appear to have a tinted monocle.

 

A chap needs to maintain an air of mystery.

 

My shoes are definitely the stars of this photo. They look like they're celebrating getting their own TV series. 

 

I spent today arguing about MFA programs, over on the New York Times' Papercuts blog. You can tell I'm dodging some serious writing, huh? A typical contribution from me went something like this...

 

"Literature is, among other things, a long cascade of mentorings. Fitzgerald helped Hemingway. Beckett sat at the foot of blind Joyce, taking dictation for Finnegans Wake.

But Fitzgerald didn’t invoice Hemingway. And Beckett didn’t have to pay Joyce $100,000 to sit there.

(In fact, Joyce paid Beckett - in cast-off clothes, neither of them being commercially glorious).

It is remarkably cheeky of the universities to try to put mentoring - something which has to be extraordinarily personal, intimate, and freely given, if it is to have any meaning - on a sound commercial footing. Buying the mentoring of better writers is an extraordinary form of prostitution, which degrades both parties. (You should hear what creative writing teachers say to each other about their students after a workshop. Very reminiscent of what prostitutes say to each other after the johns have left.)

Perhaps, occasionally, a good writer will discover a potentially good writer, and real mentoring will take place. But what is the moral condition of the vast mass of relationships which have been forced into existence? Bad faith, bad faith.

And there is a more fundamental philosophical problem.

The novel is against authority, or it is nothing.

The university is authority, or it is nothing.

The two are uniquely unsuited to a close embrace.

Universities (given the way society is currently organised), have to expand. Sometimes they expand into territory to which they are wildly unsuited. The novel is one place they should never have ventured. Claiming to “teach” creative writing for money is morally dubious. But for the universities to employ such large numbers of potentially good writers as teachers, forcing them to daily read the worst prose ever written… well, it’s the kind of hellish torture Dante would have found a bit much. What sin could have earned such punishment?

Betraying your muse, perhaps.

The MFA in creative writing is a very successful industry. But its main product is embittered teachers of creative writing, (who nightly stifle the thought of what they might have written had they not had to read, grade and workshop student dreck for 20 years).

Not writers."

 

I, of course, totally overstate my case, and repeatedly break my only rule, that a writer should have no opinions. 

The whole thing, may God have mercy on us all, is here. 

The splendid Tony Wilson, former head of Factory Records, died on August 10th, aged 57. The death of the man who gave the world Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays, and who built the Haçienda, has been attributed to complications arising from kidney cancer.

 
Nonsense.

 
I blame Tony Wilson's sadly early demise on the sequence of ferocious blows to the head he received from my friends Gareth Allen (the artist) and Phil "The Punk" Rose (the photographer), during a Toasted Heretic gig in the Powerhaüs in London around 1990. (Tony Wilson and some heavy friends were checking us out, after Factory's A&R chief at the time, the extraordinarily nice Phil Saxe, had praised us highly.)

 

Sadly, only one photo survives from that night (and it's here). Phil and Gareth, to add a little class to the evening,  mingled with the crowd while wearing Roman togas (made from the curtains of their flat in Walthamstow), and fed the crowd grapes. When the grapes ran out, Gareth and Phil began to bang Tony Wilson on the head with a Charles and Di Royal Wedding full-colour souvenir teatray, tastefully adapted by Gareth with felt tip pens so that Charles and Di had swastikas for eyes. (Was a young Bobby Gillespie in the audience and taking thoughtful notes for these Primal Scream lyrics? We shall never know...)

It started out as a quite friendly tapping, and Tony was nervously amused. But soon the Romans were beating Tony Wilson like a gong, putting many dents in the tea tray, bringing him to his knees, while Wilson's extremely heavy minders looked on in tremendous confusion, unsure if this was part of the show, which was already a bit out of hand. (Maybe "out of hand" isn't quite the term. While I was singing "Lost and Found", a girl plunged a hand down the crotch of my skintight pink jumpsuit, and discovered that I wasn't wearing anything else. One of those awkward social moments, where you both hesitate, neither party quite sure what the etiquette is. I kept singing, though my voice may have briefly risen an octave.)

It ended, as did many Toasted Heretic gigs, in confusion.

We did not sign to Factory Records.

Later Gareth, while attempting to mount a bronze lion, fell into a fountain in Trafalgar Square and split his head open. Gareth and Phil wandered off, in their togas, in search of a hospital. We carried the drums and amps back to their place, and wondered would we see them again.

At dawn, Gareth, his soaked and bloodstained toga long lost, arrived home triumphant, having travelled barefoot across London wearing a backless hospital gown which revealed his bum. Protected only by his Virtue, and by Phil in a toga.

Ah yes, in those days we made our own entertainment. So anyway, Gareth and Phil murdered Tony Wilson. A long-forgotten fragment of Royal Wedding Tea-Tray must have shifted a fatal millimetre.

When people say that music doesn't sound as good these days, they usually just mean they aren't having as much sex these days.

But, if you liked the way pop music used to sound fifteen years ago, then the music genuinely doesn't sound as good these days, and it's for straightforward technical reasons.

For several years, record companies have been fighting a secret war, the Loudness War, and it has changed the sound of pop music. Really, "changed" is too small a word for it. It has abolished the dynamic range of pop music. The loud bits are no longer loud, and the quiet bits are no longer quiet. And here is why…

Record companies want their albums to sound louder than the other guy's album, in shops, on your hi-fi, wherever, because people tend to think that the louder of two songs is the better of two songs. That’s just the way our brains are wired.

So record companies have been boosting the overall loudness of CDs. But there's a maximum loudness limit to the digital signal on a CD. Increasing the overall loudness increases the loudness of the quiet bits: but it doesn't (it can't) increase the loudness of the bits that were already at maximum loudness.

Imagine the loudest part of a song as Mount Everest, and the quietest part as the bottom of a valley, five miles below. There is a physical upper limit on how loud the song can get on a CD: metaphorically, nothing can be taller than Mount Everest. Ten or twenty years ago, songs had a five-mile dynamic range: songs had dramatic peaks and troughs. Quiet bits whispered, and loud bits roared.

By raising the volume of the quiet bits, the Loudness War has filled in the valleys. Which makes the mountains seem much, much smaller.

The loud bits still roar: but now the quiet bits roar too. So you turn down the overall volume on your iPod or stereo or computer, to a more comfortable overall volume. Which means that, perversely, you don’t get the benefit of the “louder” album. But you do lose the dynamics which made the original song interesting.

This is why re-releases of old albums often sound strangely flat and undramatic compared to your memory of the vinyl or early CD original. They ARE less dramatic. They’ve been remastered “louder”.

It also makes them more tiring to listen to.

You know how you talk to your friends? Mostly you’re just talking away, but now and then one of you gets excited and shouts, and it’s exciting because it doesn’t happen very often? Well, if Warner Brothers reissued that conversation, YOU WOULD ALL BE SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. PASS THE SALT. THANKS. I’M GLAD IT’S RAINING, THE GARDEN NEEDS IT. WOULD ANYONE LIKE A COFFEE? SURE. ME TOO. YEAH I’LL HAVE A COFFEE, NO MILK. I LOVE YOUR HAT.

Very, very tiring. And if someone got shot in the middle of it, Jesus Christ appeared, and the world ended, you wouldn’t notice, because it would all happen at exactly the same volume as a polite request for a biscuit.

Here’s a great visual explanation of what’s been going on, in three minutes of excellent video:







More on this later maybe, if anyone cares.