http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15897803
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Sent from my iPhone
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Most Alive
"The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone."
-MARTIN AMIS Sent from my iPhone
-MARTIN AMIS Sent from my iPhone
Monday, November 28, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Friday, November 25, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Friday, November 18, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
THE BRILLIANCE OF BURGESS
Burgess Interview Excerpt from the Paris Review
I
NTERVIEWER
Composers traffic heavily in transitions. Isn’t this particular instance of literary composition by musical analogy an example of “formal trickery,” best understood by the reader who is at least an amateur musician?
BURGESS
I think that music does teach practitioners in other arts useful formal devices, but the reader doesn’t have to know their provenance. Here’s an example. A composer modulates from one key to another by the use of the “punning” chord, the augmented sixth (punning because it is also a dominant seventh). You can change, in a novel, from one scene to another by using a phrase or statement common to both—this is quite common. If the phrase or statement means different things in the different contexts, so much the more musical.
INTERVIEWER
One notices that the form of A Vision of Battlements is meant to be similar to that of Ennis’s passacaglia, but can any but the most tenuously analogous relation be established between literature and music generally?
BURGESS
I agree that the musico-literary analogies can be pretty tenuous, but in the widest possible formal sense—sonata form, opera, and so on—we’ve hardly begun to explore the possibilities. The Napoleon novel I’m writing apes the Eroica formally—irritable, quick, swiftly transitional in the first movement (up to Napoleon’s coronation); slow, very leisurely, with a binding beat suggesting a funeral march for the second. This isn’t pure fancy: It’s an attempt to unify a mass of historical material in the comparatively brief space of about 150,000 words. As for the reader having to know about music—it doesn’t really matter much. In one novel I wrote, “The orchestra lunged into a loud chord of twelve notes, all of them different.” Musicians hear the discord, nonmusicians don’t, but there’s nothing there to baffle them and prevent them reading on. I don’t understand baseball terms, but I can still enjoy Malamud’s The Natural. I don’t play bridge, but I find the bridge game in Fleming’s Moonraker absorbing—it’s the emotions conveyed that matter, not what the players are doing with their hands.
INTERVIEWER
What about film technique as an influence on your writing?
BURGESS
I’ve been much more influenced by the stage than by the film. I write in scenes too long for unbroken cinematic representation. But I like to run a scene through in my mind before writing it down, seeing everything happen, hearing some of the dialogue. I’ve written for both television and cinema, but not very successfully. Too literary, or something. I get called in by makers of historical films to revise the dialogue, which they then restore to its original form.
I
NTERVIEWER
Composers traffic heavily in transitions. Isn’t this particular instance of literary composition by musical analogy an example of “formal trickery,” best understood by the reader who is at least an amateur musician?
BURGESS
I think that music does teach practitioners in other arts useful formal devices, but the reader doesn’t have to know their provenance. Here’s an example. A composer modulates from one key to another by the use of the “punning” chord, the augmented sixth (punning because it is also a dominant seventh). You can change, in a novel, from one scene to another by using a phrase or statement common to both—this is quite common. If the phrase or statement means different things in the different contexts, so much the more musical.
INTERVIEWER
One notices that the form of A Vision of Battlements is meant to be similar to that of Ennis’s passacaglia, but can any but the most tenuously analogous relation be established between literature and music generally?
BURGESS
I agree that the musico-literary analogies can be pretty tenuous, but in the widest possible formal sense—sonata form, opera, and so on—we’ve hardly begun to explore the possibilities. The Napoleon novel I’m writing apes the Eroica formally—irritable, quick, swiftly transitional in the first movement (up to Napoleon’s coronation); slow, very leisurely, with a binding beat suggesting a funeral march for the second. This isn’t pure fancy: It’s an attempt to unify a mass of historical material in the comparatively brief space of about 150,000 words. As for the reader having to know about music—it doesn’t really matter much. In one novel I wrote, “The orchestra lunged into a loud chord of twelve notes, all of them different.” Musicians hear the discord, nonmusicians don’t, but there’s nothing there to baffle them and prevent them reading on. I don’t understand baseball terms, but I can still enjoy Malamud’s The Natural. I don’t play bridge, but I find the bridge game in Fleming’s Moonraker absorbing—it’s the emotions conveyed that matter, not what the players are doing with their hands.
INTERVIEWER
What about film technique as an influence on your writing?
BURGESS
I’ve been much more influenced by the stage than by the film. I write in scenes too long for unbroken cinematic representation. But I like to run a scene through in my mind before writing it down, seeing everything happen, hearing some of the dialogue. I’ve written for both television and cinema, but not very successfully. Too literary, or something. I get called in by makers of historical films to revise the dialogue, which they then restore to its original form.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
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Friday, November 11, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
@flavorpill, 11/10/11 1:39 PM
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Wednesday, November 9, 2011
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