J. H. Prynne

line b

line b

Well-known member
version said:
Relevant.

What the mentally disturbed Dylanologists have never understood over the course of Zimmy’s six-decade spanning career is that to scour the man’s lyrics for hidden truths is a fool’s errand. It’s a simple trick to understand Bob Dylan, really: all you have to do is approach his lyrics at their apparent meaning. So when Dylan crows:

“Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan"

there’s no need to dig further than the emotive qualities of the image itself. Dylan has always been something of a lyrical impressionist: his songs are tone poems which seek to promote feelings of unrest or longing or confusion or disenfranchisement or indignation depicted within the given snippet of narrative that Dylan loves to ornament his songs with. To deconstruct more rigorously is to miss the point—like trying to appreciate a painting with a microscope.
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yah this is what I was getting at. I think Dylan is very good at using strange images to elicit familiar emotions.

Err, maybe not even familiar emotions, but at least making the strange images register, rather than just passing by as noise
 
version

version

Well-known member
version

version

Well-known member
version said:
The death of the author signifies a decline in authority, in theological power, as if Zeus were stripped of his thunderbolts and swans, perhaps residing on Olympus still, but now living in a camper and cooking with propane. He is, but he is no longer a god.
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luka

luka

Well-known member
Linebaugh said:
What does all the scientific lingo lend to this interpretation? kinda gives it a Burroughs like feel- making acts of immaterial communication feel alive with biomatter
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The intention is slightly different perhaps but it definitely provides a link to Burroughs and perhaps even more so to Ballard.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
constant escape said:
Pollen is the means by which one system can bank on the ether (ether relative to what is known to the plant) to communicate with a kin system? Funny how these hail marys sort themselves out, and rather fruitfully.
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He's fascinated with botany. He made friends with Rupert Sheldrake while sheldrake was at Cambridge researching the wound response in plants. Anything he's interested in he can just knock on the door of the worlds leading scholar down the coridoor and ask some questions.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
@suspendedreason is going to be really jealous when he sees Limburger being great. He's going to get super competitive and really go full bore on this poem so he can be the best American. Can't wait. It's going to be amazing and very productive.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I do find it hilarious that you've chosen one of the most impenetrable bits in the whole book rather than start at the easy end. Not necessarily a bad way to go about it mind you. My first two intitial ports of entry were both with woops. When he first bought his edition we went on a pub crawl and ended up at that strange seldom attained state of clarity, like a magical forest clearing, within the drunkeness and read Word Order and what became clear in that state was how precise and pleasure able the patterning was.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
The other one was in the early hours of New Year's Day a few years back, cocktail of drugs and alcohol and then chain smoking DMT and reading the ideal star-fighter,

Those were the moments when it became clear that there was something going on here, it wasn't just a donnish practical joke, and you can make something of it, enjoy it, enjoy struggling with it.
 
B

boxedjoy

Well-known member
I've never encountered Prynne outside of this thread tbh

my boyfriend is obsessed with Burroughs though, he once recorded an album based on the ideas then scrapped it

thank you for the tag @version but sorry I have no lines ready to deliver for the TED talk
 
version

version

Well-known member
Who was it who said the thing about music being the highest form, or that all art should aspire to the quality of music?
 
version

version

Well-known member
Apparently it was Walter Pater, whom I've never heard of,

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
version said:
Who was it who said the thing about music being the highest form, or that all art should aspire to the quality of music?
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Kierkegaard says it in Either/Or, in the chapter The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or Musical Erotic, where he makes the case that the erotic is the hardest thing to capture in art, and that music does it best, and therefore music is the best art. All to make the case that Don Giovanni is the pinnacle of art, but I forget how he made the case for that above other music. I don't know anything about Don Giovanni outside of this, though.
 
version

version

Well-known member
I think it's in Lynch on Lynch where it mentions someone's professor or a critic complaining Lynch was putting them out of a job because Blue Velvet had all the subtext on the surface.
 
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