Wider Reading | Don Paterson Namechecks Silkworms (sort of)

The Jocks and the Geordies from the Beano, your classic 

farty wee boys in gang-huts

Whilst it’s nice to know you’re even on the radar of a man who, to at least one Silkworms editor’s mind, has written at least three of the ten finest collections of poetry published over the last decade and a half or so, there was an overtone of chastisement in Don Paterson’s acknowledgement of our site in Saturday’s Guardian Review:

Facebook and blogs have helped enormously, though the blogs are still split between responsible, informative and entertaining sites such as Katy Evans-Bush’s excellent Baroque in Hackney, and too many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys’ gang-huts, and where membership is conditional on hating the right people.

He’s talking about us. I’m certain of it. The sensation is part sadomasochistic thrill, and part reminiscent of a daydream I keep having in which I finally get the opportunity to meet Nick Cave, interviewing him maybe (the nearest I’ve got so far was an interview with the other members of Grinderman a few months back) and he calls me an arsehole or something. The famously hostile Zane Lowe Culture Show interview probably has something to do with this – if you can watch it to the end, you’re more of a vertebrate than I:

ZL: …a bidda Ziggy Stardust, just perhaps conceptually in the record, in the sense that there appears to be a certain character emerging…? I don’t know whether that’s a good observation or a bad one…?

NC: The Grinderman songs are extremely personal. It’s not as though we built some kind of alter-ego, which brings back the Ziggy Stardust thing: it’s not, it’s absolutely NOT our intention.

Nick later looks Lowe in the eye and murmers, ‘interviews are hugely counter-productive.’ It’s a curious thing, suspecting that the people you admire most in the world probably wouldn’t like you.

SKS

Generation | Poetry | TS3L10T

"Poems are machines for remembering themselves."

-Don Paterson

For the first time in years I went cycling today. It was exhausting. I kept thinking to myself 'machines are much better than people at the whole transport thing, aren't they?' I mean, having a nice bike ride or a run from time to time is pretty fun, but cars are essentially better built for the job, in terms of efficiency and all that, right?

Successful Machines = Efficiency + Autonomy + Saving of Money + Sexy Design (optional)

My point is... I have recently been reading an equally fascinating and mind-numbing thesis on machines being able to generate poetry. Aside from the idea itself being quite poetic, the paper makes for frustrating reading. I get the impression that the author, one Hisar Maruli Manurung, doesn't spend much time with poets, based on phrases like:

"We propose a model of poetry generation as a state space search problem, where a goal state is a text that satisfies the three properties of meaningfulness, grammaticality, and poeticness. We argue that almost all existing work on poetry generation only properly addresses a subset of these properties."

Part of me likes the idea of poetry being the litmus test for the existence of A.I., as it is supposedly "a task which, if done by a human, requires intelligence to perform." Is the hard-wiring of a soul provable only through poetry? Would The Terminator enjoy Ezra Pound? I can sort of imagine his data-scrolling infra-red vision scanning the Cantos for esoteric references. 

The problem with this line of research is that poems are fundamentally at odds with machinery in so many ways.

Firstly, poetry ain't efficient and it certainly isn't about saving money. To write, read and publish poetry is a financial dead-end, and is procrastination of the highest order. Poetry is what happens when you try to take your mind for a walk in the park and it stays rooted for hours, sniffing the trunk of a tree covered in another mind's piss.

The biggest problem with this research however, is that it is based on a false premise. Writing poetry is not "a task which, if done by a human, requires intelligence to perform". Sorry poets, but it's not. In fact, poetry is often a task which requires its writer to fight against their own intelligence, combating prolixity and deliberate encryption in the name of honesty. Sometimes.

What does require intelligence however, is reading poetry. This is the biggest problem with the premise of a machine generating poetry... poems are designed to make the readers do half the work themselves. The Red Wheelbarrow is the finest example of this - the poetic sentiment is there once we realign our perceptions and bring our own semantic contributions to the reading.

This is why, when we interrogate Manurung's thesis, he is not genuinely giving us the promise of a machine that writes poems but rather assuring us "that computer programs can indeed autonomously generate texts that are considered poetic". And right there, in that word 'considered' is the achilles heel of the argument. For all the ideology behind 'meaningfulness+grammaticality+poeticness=poetry', the only thing that makes something officially poetic is 'consideration'.

Well, I argue that we don't need machines to sit round naval gazing, poking away with quill and parchment. Humans and machines have always lived in a shifting artistic equilibrium. Look at what beautiful artistic movements came as a result of the camera doing a much more convincing job of portraiture.

Now consider thermal imaging, ultra-sound scanners, aeroplanes, iMax, triple-distilled vodka, roller-coasters, silent discos, Facebook...

These things are all doing the job of poetry. That is, they are showing us the same world we have always lived in, but in a way which we are not always ready for. And, as a result, our poetry is effected. We scribble our verses now, not at the pace of footfall, but at the speed of engines. Our references and influences and motifs are as varied as the internet allows us for inspiration. Our egos and ids are irreversibly hacked into by every aspect of the media.

So please, by all means train a computer to write poetry, but I implore you not to do so until you have programmed it to start running an application for jaded solipsism every time it gets a bad review.

Hollywood | Music | Musical Hollywooding

J.K. Rowling's Minerva McGonagall - the Harry Potter books are full of po-mo references to other bad writing.

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the final poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection, Rain – that’s not a typo by the way, both poem and collection are in fact entitled Rain, and the first line of said poem also includes the word ‘rain’, so those three rains have to be there, I know, I’m as put out as you are… (What is the correct means of dealing with this problem of poems and collections sometimes sharing the same name – and the sometimes-necessity of putting both in the same sentence, thus creating a clunky, clunky sentence? Title-poem?)

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the title- (and closing-) poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection. It continues thus:

rain, braiding a windowpane

or darkening a hung-out dress

or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour

right through the empty script and score

before the act, before the blame,

before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone

beside a silent telephone

or the dress lies ruined on the grass

or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source

along their fatal watercourse.

However bad or overlong

such a film can do no wrong,

(For the whole thing, lookee here)

It’s a wonderful piece of writing, playing similar games with technique-expectation, art-about-art and the concept of simplicity as Song For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze in the same collection, and The Rat and The Reading in Landing Light. And its point – at least, its point until the fabled Paterson italics kick in a couple stanzas down – is, I think, spot on also. Hell, I remember, eight years old, going to lie down and sky-face in my garden in my shorts whenever the summer rain came, because I’d seen somebody in some film I thought was awesome or something doing the same. It’s a bloody lovely feeling, incidentally. Makes you look like a prick though, so I stopped. Pity, really.

Rain: one of the most successful and common Hollywooding techniques there is. Hollywooding: the covering up of any number of individual crippling flaws in a film via evocative, heart-bursting shit – a method popularised, undoubtedly, by Hollwood. So, rain: one of the most successful Hollywooding techniques there is. Another one: music.

Lovely, lovely film-music. What follows is not going to be a lengthy diatribe about the subtleties of good and bad film-scoring slash -soundtracking though because, one, such things have been done far too many times already (yah, the thing about Tarantino is that his approach to track-selection for his soundtracks mirrors exactly the way his films are, in fact, a bricolage of reference and little nods to, y’know, B movies and stuff) and two, because the relationship between Hollywooding and music is about something much more specific than whole soundtracks. It’s about moments, see. (All this said, I’ll be including the Twin Peaks theme on this week’s essay-soundtrack-playlist for reference’s sake, because it’s so completely magnificent. Oh, and if anyone is, in fact, at all interested in what people are still saying about scores etc., you could do worse than read this.)

Moments. Individual moments during which the empty script and score or bad or overlong sequences are, particularly, unambiguously, shamelessly glossed with the music-equivalent of Paterson’s rain. It is these that are the currency of musical Hollywooding, not soundtracks as a whole. Everybody can call to mind one such scene immediately, surely… Here’s mine. Ah yes, we’re all at a funeral but we’re all going walk out halfway through, because that’s totally cool, in order to get our hands on a photocopy of Ryan Pillipay’s journal that we’re all suddenly aware of the significance of and that incrimates Buffy totally (I’M A BITCH! Benedict Bitch!) without any of us actually having the time to read it – to the point that her 70s-pimp-style blow-crucifix gets nabbed, poor love. And then two of us are going to ruefully shake our heads in the most breathtaking display of accidentally-comic condemnation ever filmed. And all of this, all of this is redeemed via ‘mad’ Richard Ashcroft and a set of vaguely convenient lyrics.

‘One of the best endings to any movie I have ever seen,’ gushes Youtube user Worldskye. Worldskye, it sounds to me like you’re a fucking idiot. (What a car though, right?)

Anyway, for the purposes of Music As Reading, I’m interested in whether this technique is capable of glossing bad writing of another sort. Poetry, specifically. Can the right music make awful poetry sound like a specific genre of good poetry because of its own connotations? Can Hollywooding save bad poetry? Don Paterson having been my starting point, I will be utilising that unlikely influence of his, the utterly great William Topaz McGonagall as the focal-point of this experiment. And to celebrate Brief Encounter’s perfect use of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – no Hollywooding there – I will be relying upon ‘classical’ (whatever that means) work only. The following three ideas will be expanded upon – and accompanied by several others – on this Saturday’s mixtape, A Musical McGonagall.

The Tay Bridge Disaster + Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 = Hitchcockian suspense…?

…It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

The Christmas Goose + Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2 = Arthouse enigma…?

…When Smiggs bought the goose
He suspected no harm,
But a naughty boy stole it
From under his arm.

Then Smiggs he cried, “Stop, thief!
Come back with my goose!”
But the naughty boy laugh'd at him,
And gave him much abuse…

An Autumn Reverie + Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings = Lush panorama…?

Alas! Beautiful Summer now hath fled,
And the face of Nature doth seem dead,
And the leaves are withered, and falling off the trees,
By the nipping and chilling autumnal breeze.

The pleasures of the little birds are all fled,
And with the cold many of them will be found dead,
Because the leaves of the trees are scattered in the blast,
And makes the feathered creatures feel downcast…

(To access a Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Second Person | Mixtape | Mixtape II, Songs for Natalie

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

Music As Reading: Mixtape II, Songs for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze, after Don Paterson

O who is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows ranged like two duelling pistols, lightly sweating in the pale light of the TTF screen?

Writing actually about music was always going to be an early focus of Music As Reading – it represents a point at which a connection between music-listening and words-reading becomes kind of inevitable: here’s how a writer has described an artist slash song, now I’d better listen to it slash them myself to see how good a job he slash she did. Inevitable, then, but necessary? Does a writer writing about music have as much of an obligation to describe his subject with a precision and three-dimensionality capable of catalysing a reader’s mind’s-eye – without any kind of visual or aural aid – as, I don’t know, a travel-writer sketching a remote destination? Almost certainly – but looking at the breed of metaphor peddled by the NME (the chorus: Frank Black buttfucking Iggy with a barbed-wire-guitar whist Steve Albini squats in the background ejaculating asymmetrical reverb-lines by way of lubrication etc. etc.) rarely is this obligation met with much success (is it even possible?) And neither does justice or precision seem to be Don Peterson’s project with Song…, which owes more to the wonderful bad-poetry of William McGonagall than it does to the best of music journalism.

Rather, Song… is far more encyclopaedic than it is descriptive, choosing in the main to catalogue and generalise (although ‘a kind of glitch-hop Blossom Dearie’ is breathtakingly eloquent, it must be said). Indeed, against a backdrop of actual tracks, the poem sheds a good deal of its seeming music literacy, the sentence that inspires Part two of the mixtape appearing particularly problematic and uselessly generalising – until one remembers that the piece is, A, that rare thing, a genuinely funny poem, and B, as much an indictment of avant-garde electronic geekery as it is a celebration: ‘the true focus of one not merely content – as, no doubt, were others at the Mänover Elektronische Festival in Wien – / to hit play while making some fraudulent correction to a volume slider’. The layers of irony, deliberate obfuscation and acute, high-spec knowledge thus make for a more complex and challenging Music As Reading experience than, say, a haughty comparison of journalistic similes with the records they describe – isn’t writing about music far more about writing than it is about music?

(Don Paterson’s Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze can be located in his latest volume of poetry, Rain, published by Faber)



Part one
…your fine vocals, which, while admittedly limited in range and force, are nonetheless much more affecting than the affected Arctic whisperings of those interchangeably dreary / Stinas and Hannes and Bjorks, being in fact far closer in spirit to a kind of glitch-hop Blossom Dearie…

Gorod – Tusia Beridze
Butterfly – Stina Nordenstam
Break My Body - Hanne Hukkelberg
Everything I’ve Got – Blossom Dearie
Wound – Tusia  Beridze

Part two
…how can I pay tribute to your infinitely versatile blend of Nancarrow, Mille Plateaux, Venetian Snares, Xenakis, Boards of Canada and Nobukazu Takemura…

String Quartet, Allegro molto – Conlon Nancarrow
Frictional Nevada – Venetian Snares
Cvet – Tusia Beridze
Plektó – Iannis Xenakis
Kursaa – Tusia Beridze
Roygbiv – Boards of Canada
Alone with the Alone – Zü & Nobukazu Takemura


Part three
…this little I have gleaned: firstly, that you are married to Thomas Brinkmann, whose records are boring – an opinion I held long before love carried me away…

Hextention – Tusia Beridze
Isch – Thomas Brinkmann
Smattack – Tba
Walk With Me – Thomas Brinkmann
Late – Tusia Beridze

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor