wind in the willows at theatre 503

after a few days break, from tomorrow its back on with wind in the willows at theatre 503, with my ridiculous musical accompaniment...

http://www.theatre503.com/whatson/detail/225/

further things and furthering things

Paul Klee - obsessed with light and colour, and he used to design the insignias on the wings of planes in the first world war. Biplanes? Hope so.

The Biplane, such as it is, and it kind of isn't - observantly you might have noticed that November is over; the novel isn't over, it's exactly 1/3 finished - but such as it is or isn't, is about Dante's ideas about light, in a way. More on this later... but I think light is quite interesting, well obviously light is quite interesting.

Paul Klee is part of it, pretty much everything is part of it. As a piece of writing, I want it to be like something real rather than fictional, I mean like something that could actually happen even though it is impossible and, worse yet, impossible to explain. It's split roughly into a blog, complete with emoticons, and a third person narrative, occasionally directly addressing the reader, and then footnotes that are from one of the character's diaries. So far there are only two but they are the best things in it.

Anyway I have a few days off from The Wind in the Willows, which is going quite well, there is a lot of music in it, which you can have if you like, but writing is a bit difficult again. So I found some nice things; well a lot of things have helped anyway: China Mieville's blog, which is such great writing and such a great use of the internet, The Fanclub (whose floor I'm sleeping on) being played on Radio 2, a book on Paul Klee I got for £2 in a charity shop including this print

, the discovery this morning that Donald Barthelme, whose writing I only know by hearsay from Will Kerr's song 'Die By The Seaside' which we've been gradually turning into a sleeping passengers track I think, has written about Klee's aeroplane painting job in the war, being introduced to the existence of Blackpool manager Ian Holloway (I know nothing about football, really), reading Dante's Vita Nuova (which does get a bit boring in places but is kind of great), coming back to Josh and Lewis and Alex's flat last night in the cold and dark and discovering that they were watching Iron Man with Iron Man 2 queued...

Dear Diary, how are you?

By the Bog of Cats documentary

Tegid Cartwright, whose E.P. I reviewed on the first day of this blog, has produced a lovely little documentary about By the Bog of Cats..., a play that a group of Warwick students took to the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough. I was in the play, and was director of music: I composed a load of themes and then got some awesome musicians (Jenni Mellor, Will Kerr, Tegid himself [though he wasn't playing with us in Scarborough], Oliver Steadman [you might know him better as the bassist from Stornoway], and Rosie Bristow) to rework them, add their own ideas, change things, etc. It did very well there; universally good reviews and a string of awards including the Festgoers Award (voted for by the attendees of the festival as their favourite performance, which it won 'by a landslide') and the Cameron Mackintosh Award for Music in Theatre.

http://tegidcartwright.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/ah-go-on/

The documentary is not completely finished yet, but Teg's put it up on his blog as he wants comments and feedback to help him tweak it.

It's a nice bit of nostalgia for me, but I think it is also quite a nice insight into how music and theatre can be made to work together. It is also extremely embarrassing, and I would like to find a way to avoid filmed interviews in future.

Various theatre projects are in the pipeline, and I'll be posting more about them soon.

The Biplane

Dr. Stephen Shapiro: When you're writing, it helps to know what or who you're writing against; what is it that you're trying to displace in literature, what you are opposing.

China Mieville: Yes, that's a good question. So, in The Biplane, what are you writing against?

Me: I'm writing against China Mieville. And all apocalyptic literature.
- China Mieville's Weird Fiction seminar, 2008

Now, The Biplane was always a good enough idea. I mean, as it stands at the moment, it's a bit too weird and pseudo-existential and, I'm constantly being told, has plotlines which resemble that of the TV series Lost (which I haven't seen, so can't judge). But it's got a good title, which is something, and China Mieville - who wrote The City and the City, which is undoubtedly one of the most exciting novels of the past few years - was very positive about it.

So, as a way to force myself to write it, I'm doing it as a NaNoWriMo. That means I'm writing a novel the length of November. No, it means I'm writing an entire novel in the month of November. Quentin S. Crisp is doing it, so it must be a good idea.

We'll see.

six word short story for Smith Magazine

Think you're pretty.

Think you're neat.

[on Smith Magazine]

the ethics of magic

Zuhra Bahman's New Internationalist article on the sorcerers of Kabul makes a compelling case against their modes of operation. Bahman argues that, by selling women charms such as taweez and showest, these sorcerers con women not only out of their money but out of their ability to combat social inequality:

The loss... is not only monetary. This con pushes women into an irrational space, away from the rational world of science, expression, politics and social activism.

Of course, the rational world - or at least, that which claims to be the rational world - can be equally oppressive, which is why irrational space can be so appealing and, I hope, genuinely liberating. Bahman hints at this in her closing paragraph:

If women started trampling over these taweez and showest, and were vocal about their irrelevance to the modern world, these conmen would have to close up shop. Alternatively, maybe I should start a new movement where I shold speak with the djinn of human rights and the ghost of rationality, and advise women to question their situation a bit more deeply; and see the evil in germs, in viruses and in the society run by men.

As much as Bahman is being purposefully ironic, this alternative magic is pretty appealing to anyone who wishes to combine their spirituality with their political idealism. George Santayana sees it in Dante:

...how can the unchanging, the ideal, the eventual, initiate anything or determine the disposition and tendency of what actually lives and moves? The answer, or rather the impossibility of giving an answer, may be expressed in a single world: magic. It is magic when a good or interesting result, because it would prove good or interesting, is credited with marshalling the conditions and evoking the beings that are to realise it.[1]

This, for Santayana, is the essence of Dante's supernaturalism. This is irrational thought, but it's powerful because it lets us value our ideals in their own right: they don't just make things happen, they happen. We don't make them or let them happen, we recognise and our thus part of their happening; this is the same thing as resisting the things that stop them from happening.

---

[1] George Santayana. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe. New York: Doubleday, 1910. p. 94

What is broader than the way?

What is louder than an horn,
And what is sharper than a thorn?

Thunder is louder than an horn,
And hunger is sharper than a thorn.

What is broader than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea?

Love is broader than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea.

These are the four questions asked by the Riddling Knight in the medieval ballad of the same name. At least, in my source – Poets of the English Language, vol. 1 (edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson), which is currently disguised as A Guide to Pigeon Fancying by Humphrey Johnston (it was a prop in the preview of The Fever Chart for the Warwick Arts Festival) – the knight asks these four questions and each is answered immediately by the maid. This is slightly baffling, considering that he proposes to ask her three questions ('And if you can answer questions three, / O then, fair maid, I will marry with thee'). Other versions of the ballad, such as the one appropriated by brilliantly named sixties folk band The 3Ds on their Poetry Album, has the knight propose to ask three but actually ask six questions (in their version the maid answers all six together, after he’s finished asking). Considering the six questions fit into three two-part questions, this makes a little more sense – though it’s still strange; also, the language in their version is quite different, making the meaning shift a bit. Particularly relevant for what I’m talking about here is the final question, which in this other version is given as

What is longer than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea?

[...]

The wind is longer than the way,
And love is deeper than the sea.

In this version, the poem is more obviously leading towards love: a love deeper than the sea. This feels a little more clichéd than a love ‘broader than the way’: it lacks the connotations of generosity and variety that broadness implies, giving a more convention idea of love having ‘depth.’ In other words, The 3Ds’ version talks about emotion in terms of volume (depth), which is likely to feel familiar, while Auden’s version talks about emotion in terms of scope (breadth), which is more complex.

For the sake of this discussion, I’ll put the two final riddles next to each other:

What is broader than the way, What is longer than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea? And what is deeper than the sea?
[...]
Love is broader than the way, The wind is longer than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea. And love is deeper than the sea.

There is only one constant between the two versions: the sea, agreed to be symbolic of depth. In both cases, it can only be exceed by a transcendent idea – that is, one that is both physical and metaphysical: love, or hell. These are both understandable on their own terms: the ocean gives earthly depth, love has an emotional or spiritual depth, hell is both subterranean and a place of ‘lowness’ – cunning, evil, sin, selfishness etc. But then there’s ‘the way.’ What is the way? It’s a bit like love, and it’s a bit like the wind. It provides an archetype for both length and breadth, equal to the sea’s archetypal physical depth.

Along with Dave Devanny, I’m hoping to come to an understanding of what ‘the way’ is, how and why it comes up in so many different places, at so many different times; whether it can be perceived and controlled; whether it is a means of perception or control; or whether, as I somewhat hope, it is a subversion-through-excess of all notions of restriction, of set paths or goals, of limitations.

I’m calling my end of this project Roadmap, for the time being.

Tegid Cartwright: CtF

As an auspicious start to this blog, let me redirect you to another blog where you can hear some really interesting new music: that is, Tegid Cartwright's new CtF E.P.


Tegid is a multi-instrumentalist known to experiment with different genres; he works regularly with hip hop and urban artists in Birmingham, has composed jazz scores for theatre productions at the Warwick Arts Centre, and his fantastic Nomad Projeckt (which I strongly encourage you to check out) blends acoustic soul with Björk-esque vocal experiments. The four tracks of his solo E.P., however, stays pretty much solidly in the folky-acoustic-singer-songwriter genre, but with some intriguing experiments and roughness around the edges.

The E.P. has a neat premise: CtF has the dual meaning of being the 'Capture the Flag' videogame mode and representing the chord sequence C to F. The songs on the E.P. are actually made up of more than these two chords, but the idea of a simple repeated chord sequence is present throughout. CtF is comprised of four tracks, all recorded during a stay in a house in Wales, all using the available instruments in the house (acoustic guitar, shakey egg, and a broken pedal organ providing the bassline); a guest arrives for a weekend bringing a banjo to contribute to one of the tracks. This rough-and-ready approach is reflected in the recording style: mistakes are left in, lines are sung wrong and then immediately corrected, the organ is untunable and you can hear Tegid telling the banjo which chords to play (and having to correct himself). But the results are often both interesting and pleasing: the stilted phrasing on 'Wonder Steady' and the strange sound of autotuned organ on 'First Date', for example, highlight what this loose lo-fi style can achieve.

The broken vocal style used in particular on the final track ('CtF') owes a lot to Daniel Johnston, which is no bad thing, but it is complemented by the gentler, smoother style that dominates 'First Date.' 'First Date', the first track of the E.P., is probably the strongest: the gently played shaker is lovely, while the organ rumbles below a hypnotically repeated guitar riff and pleasantly jazzy vocal line. 'I Was Born (Two Kites)' is less together, a more Johnston-y vocal line over a shimmering guitar part reminiscent of Stornoway's 'On the Rocks' that gradually moves toward an epic vocal harmony. The third track, 'Wonder Steady', is more comfortably folk-pop, with a strong melody and a fuller sound created by the use of organ, banjo, and guitar; its awkward phrasing, however, prevents it from ever feeling clichéd by giving the pleasant sensation that it could fall apart at any minute.

The eponymous final track is a little different in feel; a passionate semi-improvised vocal over the rich sound of the organ, unexpectedly falling into place in its strong chorus. It's a fitting end to an E.P. that plays with a simple, formal approach to songwriting but then throws in a load of surprises.