Fragments

[version]

That Robin S bassline will never die. I think I told a story on here before about being stood in the street with two clubs on either side and as the doors opened two different tunes came out, both with that bassline, and synced up for a couple of seconds.

 

[version]

"A central tradition of the 19th-century decadence, a hyperaesthesia prizing and feeding on ecstatic instants, fragments of psychic continuum, answered a poetry time had reduced to fragments and endorsed the kind of attention fragments exact if we are to make anything of them at all, a gathering of the responsive faculties into the space of a tiny blue flame."

-- Kenner, The Pound Era.

 

[version]

Do songs, as pieces of art, have an essence, a soul, some non-reducible entity that is conceived upon production, and could only have been conceived in the way that it was, and remains constant through time? Or is it a bunch of different elements, instruments and sounds cobbled together to create the illusory idea of a soul?

I'd say 'a bunch of different elements, instruments and sounds cobbled together to create the illusory idea of a soul', but that 'could only have been conceived in the way that it was'. This being influenced by having recently rewatched the bit from Terre Thaemlitz's RBMA thing about music not being universal,

Can a fragment of a song give you some of the same nominal experience as hearing the actual song, or is it innately compromized? Does the fragment carry a piece of the essence or only the shadowy residuum?

I think it depends on the song. You're closer to the essence of grime when you listen to a pirate radio snippet than you are listening to a full studio track, but the reverse is true with something like Basic Channel. You need the duration and hermetically sealed studio thing. The space and repetition has no impact if you aren't listening for long enough to get lost and numbed by it.

 

[version]

This one's prodding me again re: the use of fragments in philosophy. There's something ridiculous about debates and concepts spinning out from these tiny sources. I read something the other day about Derrida discussing the fact Heidegger did and then didn't put quotations around a particular word in one of his texts; Accelerationism was birthed from a single line in Anti-Oedipus; there's a correspondence between Kojeve and Leo Strauss over some minor work of Xenophon's that's apparently noteworthy enough to have been published. I had a similar feeling when I first heard about that Toop book on the Dr. John album. Something bizarre about locking onto these things in that way. It can all seem a bit angels on the head of a pin, but it's also exciting to see how a fragment can send people spinning off like that and generate all these things.

 

[luka]

"A central tradition of the 19th-century decadence, a hyperaesthesia prizing and feeding on ecstatic instants, fragments of psychic continuum, answered a poetry time had reduced to fragments and endorsed the kind of attention fragments exact if we are to make anything of them at all, a gathering of the responsive faculties into the space of a tiny blue flame."

-- Kenner, The Pound Era.

Worth reading the whole chapter for those that havent yet

The Pound Era : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The Pound Era Hugh Kenner

archive.org

 

[version]

@line b's reading The Pound Era atm.

 

[luka]

No way!

 

[line b]

It's true I'm reading the invention of language chapter it's brilliant

 

[line b]

I'm doing it to prep for the Finnegans wake reading group I'm running because I'm tired of being an idiot and the only thing that can motivate me to read right now is fear of embarrassment or something like that

 

[version]

I'm doing it to prep for the Finnegans wake reading group I'm running because I'm tired of being an idiot and the only thing that can motivate me to read right now is fear of embarrassment or something like that

The power of negative thinking

In many ways, everything I've ever accomplished in life has been fueled by negative energy. Conquest, spite, competition, angst, boredom- rarely do I feel like the love of something is ever enough to propel its practice forward, and what pushes something over the top is negative energy. Is this...

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