Tag Archives: Dostoyevsky

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out #5 and last.

Posted by on 23 Αυγούστου 2011 No comments

Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way. (This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Alan Moore's "Watchmen"

The reader, the viewer, the cultural tourist, is actively pursuing the creation within him of different voices, vocabularies, intertextual and emotional readings of reality.

In the way that Shivering Sands has occupied my head for several days and has given me through the reading of the essays contained, and created a new scope, a new vocabulary through which i will from now on apply to my readings of his work, and also new ways in which i can describe happenings in my own life. In the way that Allan Moore was trying to contain many different voices in his work (like Oscar Wao’s favorite passage from Watchmen) and Dostoyevsky before him in his work that provided Bakhtin with his theory of polyphony.

Popular culture, as opposed with the selective coverage of disasters by the Europe-Americanocentric media, provides us with the luxury of selectively adding pages in our minds dictionary. With that dictionary, we can assess and better understand not only why we see what we see in the news, but ask questions on what we aren’t seeing enough of, (like the floods in Pakistan that were of biblical proportions or the images from the latest demonstrations in Athens that where the most massive, persistent and disobedient to date and clearly reflected that people have nothing to lose anymore).

The loss of empathy is only substituted through the creation of a globalized sensibility, a sensibility that cannot be achieved only through the direct and successful coverage of an isolated event that must at any time comply with how each media network wants to attract viewers. The need to read more subjective views of local history, essays and fictional literature, should be equally stressed. The cosmopolitan is the person that knows not only that Shivering Sands was a floating fort built to keep away Nazi planes from bombarding London, but the stories of the people that stood at the shores and watched it happen.

Of the djs that transformed it. Of the musicians that were broadcasted through those pirate radio stations. It’s not enough to know where Haiti is. You should have also have heard of the song “Haiti” by The Arcade Fire[1], and know that it’s singer is of Haitian Heritage.

And then use those informations to built your own voice.

[1] Arcade Fire are a canadian rock band, and the song Haiti was released in their first record titled “Funeral” in 2003. After the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, they donated all income from the song towards charities for Haiti.

End of final part.

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out #4

Posted by on 22 Αυγούστου 2011 No comments

Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way. (This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao).

Like Oscar Wao, we all are made up of small parts of cultures that have nothing to do with our  original cultural upbringing, but help us create a “vocabulary of thoughts”.

Chouliaraki argues that

«if researchers wish to move toward a “global village” with cosmopolitan values, then they need to examine critically the discourses and practices by which global information flows invite the individual spectator to be a public actor in the contexts of her or his everyday life” in her article The Mediation of Suffering and the Vision of a Cosmopolitan Public.»

 This should also apply in the field of essay reading and popular culture interpretation, since they both are vital building blocks of this vocabulary of thoughts, because the spectator provided with the right vocabulary can better assess distant disasters and suffering. In essence a polyphony within the viewer and a multicultural vocabulary provides him with the tools necessary to become a cosmopolitan.

Gaunt has also argued on this, saying

“Insofar as the information received from media, shapes our view of the world, it is crucial to understand these processes.”

In an article analyzing the discourses and the way the media handled the SARS virus outbreak in two thousand and three in China, Stijn Joye, argues that when a foreign society undergoes severe damage and incurs such losses to it’s members, most western spectators receive this information not first hand or by personal experience, but through the media.

I believe that much in the same way as a mediated experience, a first hand experience of such an event would only affect the western spectator or sufferer in some cases only for the time in which he is present in the scene of suffering.

Much like Vicky and Cristina of my previous example, I believe that the images carried after the witnessing of the event, will fade as soon as the «tourist» returns to his own country/life. It is only through learning of the suffering populace’s history and culture that one acquires the ability to empathize from distance. And this can be achieved remotely to a certain degree.

End of part 4

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out #3

Posted by on 20 Αυγούστου 2011 No comments

Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way.
(This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona.

 

Through serious cultural tourism you get to have a point of view on how life in England in the 50′s used to be. How incidents in Athens affected people you don’t know. How ships where build for war and how they were used for peace, and the stories of the place around them. You learn how to articulate what you are seeing. In essence you cultivate different voices within you. You don’t hold the truth, Bakhtin would dismiss that claim for sure, but you can peer at it. You see, popular culture and polyphony are taken on by the street, by one’s instinct and are used to re-synthesise bits of information to make a picture clearer, thus restoring empathy, broadening minds and transfer us on the scene of transgressions that we were not eye witnesses of. And the containment of those truths, ideas and voices, allow them to breed inside you and give birth to new ones, and you yourself then participate and become one more voice, that becomes one more small bit of the truth.

«It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of real life events that distinguish the truth from untruth.»

The concept of cultural “remote” tourism, is an idea that’s been thrown around a lot in the past decade. Because of the Internet, the ease of traveling over great distances and the continuously lowering costs of it, the world has become a much smaller place.

It has become a faster place. And in strange way, it has grown more superficial.

In 2008, Woody Allen released the film “Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona”. The film achieved a certain degree of notoriety thanks to a scene where Scarlet Johansson makes out with Penelope Cruz.

Otherwise it was criticized for being too “superficial” in it’s description of the relationships between it’s protagonists and how their stories unfolded.

I, on the other hand, found it as a quite deep description of this “superficiality” of the modern tourist. Vicky and Cristina, two american college students played by Scarlet Johansson and Rebecca Hall, arrive in Barcelona for the summer to enjoy the sun and Gaudi’s architecture and sculptures, where they get entangled in the life of a painter played by Javier Bardem. Regardless of the storyline of the film, my take on it was this, after the credits had rolled: Two american tourists visited Barcelona, got entangled in the lives of natives, affecting them in deep ways that would echo throughout them by all probabilities, and becoming part of them as well, but in the end leave to go back to their regular lives. The effect that they had on the local life, is of no consequence to them. They will have some stories to tell, while the people left behind will be the ones living with them.

In a sense, no originality, no spiritual enlightenment has occurred. Only superficial entertainment that ended as soon as the summer was through. It was an experience purchased with their airline ticket. in this sense, a person reading and dreaming about barcelona is not less in touch with it’s spirit than this type of modern tourist is.

It could leave a profound mark on his psyche, or it may pass unnoticed.

In this sense, we all are cultural “remote” tourists.

This offers a seriously more superficial experience (since it’s not actually lived) but on the other hand, opens the doors to an ability to read a stimulation through so many different texts that could somehow make up for the lack of lived experiences (or experienced experiences).

End of part 3

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out #2

Posted by on 19 Αυγούστου 2011 No comments

Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way.
(This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Taking one point out of every example i mentioned up till now, i went from a piece of literature i liked, to British History, to a family story, to a piece of popular culture and on to contemporary events that although took place in Greece, seem relevant and real to most readers.

These ideas reproduced, right here. And someone down the line might take these loosely connected showers of information and make some good use of them.

See, as i said before, i read this collections of essays, three times already.

The book has turned yellowish from the amount of highlighting i’ve performed on it.

Essentially, this piece of literature has become a part of my voice, long before i even read it and loosely connects with the idea of Bakhtin that truth is generated through «a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements».

In this sense, logically inconsistent stories and ideas of historicallity, form a polyphony that is intertextual and runs through several decades of popular culture but also draws from very different sources and cultural backgrounds.

What i find interesting with the concept of the «shared» idea and how it spreads throughout my reading on popular culture and it’s extension on my reading of my own experiences, is how it applies in terms of traveling culture, polyphony and in a way with tourism and the quest for originality (but only if we can accept that tourism in our times can sometimes be purely cultural and remote, in the sense that new technologies have allowed us to become cultural tourists without the need to visit the place where this cultural incident is taking place).

To start pulling in all the threads, let’s start with why I chose to begin with a mix and match of those «random showers of information». In Bakhtin’s Idea of polyphony the truth is not synthesized but it is contained within the existence of the different voices and arguments, it is itself polyphonic.

An argument is essentially an idea, synthesized by other ideas, just like a material thing is composed by various other elements. When I talked about the concept of the street finding it’s own use for things, I had ideas in mind.

Reading through a collection of essays, spanning almost a decade, has turned me (the reader)  into a cultural tourist. A tourist of the authors mind and the themes of his writing. I could not be a tourist if this wasn’t a non-fiction read. It is the specific range of themes, the family history, the idea that’s running through the authors head at the moment he was writing and his social commentary which (although without me being aware of it) related directly to my social condition at that very moment of writing. The voice he used though, to transmit his thoughts in a non-fictional narrative, also inhabited the protagonist of his then still running graphic novel, Transmetropolitan, thus rendering it part of the popular culture domain.

When popular culture preceeds real life events, i find that distant suffering becomes more easy to relate to. I find that in a sense Bakhtin is right to claim that truth is contained inside a plethora of voices.

When popular culture takes on the role of social commentary, it creates a precedent within the receptor that helps identify and more importantly articulate the message in thinking terms. In a way, culture substitutes for the loss of empathy taking on how people perceive the creator as a spiritual guide and a replacement to the role religion used to hold (and still does to a certain degree).

 

End of part 2

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Posted by on 18 Αυγούστου 2011 No comments

Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way.
(This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

 

Recently, an iPad came to my possession. Just because i am a raging hipster, i found nothing more suitable  as a first read to check out if iBooks is indeed readable, than a collection of essays, blog posts and cooking recipes written by Warren Ellis, a collection named Shivering Sands.

I’ve already read it three times and made dozens of notes, but more on that later.

Shivering Sands is the name of a floating fort, built right where Thames ends down at Southend-On-Sea, as Mr.Ellis explains in the last chapter of said book[1]. Built initially to keep Nazi planes from reaching and bombarding London, Shivering Sands (and other ships built in the same fashion and for the same purposes) was later used to host pirate radio stations late in the 60′s, after they fell out of use for military purposes.

The Shivering Sands in all their glory.

 

Southend-On-Sea also happens to be the place where the author resides and is also a theme to which he likes to come back to talk about this peculiarity of standing and gazing at the river meeting with the sea, on the same spot where your father and grandfather have stood before you.
But more on that later.

Going through the book, I came across a quote from another futurologist writer, Bill (William) Gibson, who in a discussion on future technology, body modifications, computers and other things not yet conceived, was quite keen on «how smart people out in the streets will take them, the street finds it’s own use for things«[2]. It’s a very interesting concept, how the street, this living breathing organism takes a thing made for entirely different purposes and aspirations, and finds it’s own use for it. Like shivering sands, a machine built for war, that was later used and conveyed by the spirit in charge of the streets of an era different than the one it was built in to transmit messages of piece, love, revolution and change.

It’s very interesting even how from draining from just one book i could take on information from one story, a non-fictional story by warren ellis on how his dad (a drummer in his youth) was approached one night by two Liverpudlians who were trying to put together a band and promised a few gigs in Berlin (an offer that his dad refused and lived to regret) and go on to talk about the Beatles and how impossibly entangled they are with modern British culture in an impossibly personal way. See, I already found another use for something as simple as a text, and these things have been around forever. Or i could use this element to go back and quote another part of Warren Ellis’ writing, from his seminal comic book series «Transmetropolitan» and how, while writing a piece on the student demonstrations in London for a Greek news website, I went back to it, to use this quote:

“There’s a jungle rhythm beating out below me; the sound of truncheons hammering on riot shields, police tradition when the street’s get nasty. I’m In Angels 8, above what will doubtless be called the Transient Riot. History’s only written by the winners after all, and if the cops want it called like the Transient Riot, than that’s how it will be. Because there’s going to be transient blood all over this place. And you know something? It’s not their fault.

… But no-one checked to see if their silly claim for secession was feasible. Civic Center just decided to stamp on them instead. They paid a few transients  to start some trouble, deliberately marring a non-violent demonstration/ Spontaneous violence, the only excuse civic center would have to send in the riot cops. These people are bleeding for a scam. It’s a show of power… I can see a blatantly unarmed man with half his face hanging off, and three cops working him over anyway.”[3]

I should have said quotes, but that’s not the point. My point was that i could replace the word Transients, with students and have a fairly accurate account of my experiences in Athens (and it’s massive riots in December of 2008) and the student riots in 2010 London.

Popular culture, a graphic novel in this case, is another thing that can be put to new uses in the street.
Maybe to tell people that what’s going on now was cooking right under their noses, and people told them about it, yet they now act surprised.

What’s common in these examples, is the concept of the idea. I like to think that ideas creep away somewhere when we’re not looking and reproduce like rabbits.

And you can never be sure what you’re going to get when two of those crazy things get it on. And furthermore, you can never, ever, be sure what “the street” will do and how it will make use of the outcome.

 

[1] In the afterword, p. 140
[2] Bill Gibson’s quote is in p. 70, lines 18-19. Bill Gibson is the Canadian writer who coined the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome” and is the writer of the now classic cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer” (1984).
[3] This is in the first volume of Transmetropolitan, p. 59 to p. 63.
 

End of part 1