Crap is a load of books

[imomus]

1. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the

Comments

[anonymous]

Consciously trying to be "subversive" is a load of crap. Did the postmodernists die in vain?

I don't think the Book Of Jokes is in any way subversive, anyway. It was published by a university publisher, respectfully reviewed in the broadsheets. The "shock" value of it is an integral part of its artistic respectability, even. "Shock", in this post-YBA age, is surely a key signifier of "artistic" intent.

Conformity is the new subversion! And vice versa!

[imomus]

"Still," said the Murderer, "it's nice to be safe. The way to live long and live well is to stay safe

Re: Conformity is the new subversion! And vice versa!

[anonymous]

I’ve read Click Opera for long enough to know exactly what your response would be. As you note yourself, what’s subversive to one age ceases to be so for the next, if the subversion is successful enough. The “subversion” then becomes a signifier of establishment artistic intent. The sort of thing you consider subversive about The Book Of Jokes was long ago subsumed into establishment literary/artistic discourse. How long ago was Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition? How long ago was it that Ballard published Crash, subsequently made into a Hollywood-backed movie? Didn’t Genet end up with a Légion d’honneur? I’m not saying that genuine subversion is no longer possible, although I think it’s certainly a lot more difficult than it used to be, as late capitalism has even embraced contestation as a means of innoculating itself from it. But one thing is certain, post '68 we really shouldn’t be looking for it in the hoary old tropes of sexual and violent transgression.

Re: Conformity is the new subversion! And vice versa!

[imomus]

This is what I tried to tell the critic from Le Figaro when he informed my french publisher that the paper wouldn't be reviewing the novel because he'd stopped reading at an episode of incestuous child rape. "Presumably you also stopped reading The Holy Bible when you got to the story of Lot, monsieur?"

[anonymous]

I kind of agree with this (other) anon that shock and subversion, post-YBA and post-Quentin Tarantino, could get past sex and violence. Everything you've said about punk could be aimed at the glorified naughtiness that tends to make up "subversion". We need less de Sades and more altermodern daydreams inside the dead soul of an exploited sandwich packer. More mercenary soldiers torturing Afghans to try to get onto the property ladder. Envisaging Kirstie Allsopp as they attach electrodes to a pair of heavy, hairy testicles.

[anonymous]

You've talked at length before about your song "Coming In A Girl's Mouth" and how subversive and out-there it was because Bobby Gillespie never would have dared do something like that. And then I finally got to hear it the other day. I have to say it didn't sound subversive in the slightest. It sounded like something a slightly naughty comedy show might have come up with - say, roughly analogous with Not The Nine O'Clock News's Cunnilingus Song. Slightly amusing, slightly risqué in a polite sort of way

[imomus]

Two points. One, I think people have a tendency to define subversion too narrowly as being just a question of sex and violence and the line (and it's a legal line, positioned at the point where the average citizen would consider something "liable to corrupt and deprave" the consumer) which demarcates what can be said from what can't. When I'd rather define it as the making visible (via challenge) of the doxa, the absolute nub of contemporaneity. That is, the place we're currently at in all debates -- the consensus we've reached at any given time in any given society, on questions from what we think marriage is for to how high up the neck a collar goes. These are all things you can "transgress" against -- in other words, they all have an "Overton Window" with unacceptable positions. And a good artist ought to take a non-consensual view, or at least remind us constantly of parallel worlds where things are done differently. It is creatively valuable to defy the consensus, if only to locate more visibly where it is

[anonymous]

And a good artist ought to take a non-consensual view

Indeed, but is this not also the consensual view of what an artist should do? Therefore it is in the artist's interest to declare the "edginess" of whatever s/he is doing, regardless of whether it is really challenging any status quo. Hence you end up with the spectacle of a coterie of artists who are fêted by the art establishment and its satellite of collectors, and yet who are also claiming to be doing something edgy, non-establishment. But this "consensual edginess" is exactly what the artist should be avoiding. It's no surprise that art and fashion are so intertwined.

[imomus]

is this not also the consensual view of what an artist should do

See, this slippage (shocking is the new not-shocking! rebelling is conforming!) is where things get boring for me. Sure, I'm as guilty as you are in perpetuating it. But it's one enormous semantic wheelspin. It takes us nowhere.

It's worth pointing out that all the writers I mentioned in today's entries are "subversive" in the wider sense I outline above. It's not a choice between "subversive" Acker and Genet and "non-subversive" Larkin and Salinger. They're all good artists, so they all subvert. The doxa, our expectations, standards of morality, and so on. They swear, they put awkward points of view, they offend. Even dear old mild codger John Betjeman did it. "Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough." How do you think they felt about that in Slough? Isn't that an incitement to murder? Would it pass muster today? Would a muslim cleric be allowed to quote it at Heathrow Terminal 5?

Mess is lore

[anonymous]

Dear Sir,

Fascism and cleanliness are more than bedfellows. They are long term partners. What is the fascist but an obsessive housewife, a social Lady Macbeth, scrubbing the world of the subhuman, the degenerate and the alien?

I propose that crap is our friend, and that crap is the cure. I dirty myself extensively before breakfast, roll around in the previous evening's detritus and then I feel fit, emanating the good vibes, for a non-fascist day!

And I recommend it to any man.

Yours,
Mr Keith K Logg
Balham

Re: Mess is lore

[imomus]

Mr Logg, I really recommend (if you can find a copy) Christian Enzensberger's little book Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt (1968).

"Clean is well and good, Clean is cheerful proper nice, Clean is above and here, Dirty is ugly and elsewhere, Clean is obviously the answer, dirty is underneath and evil, dirty is pointless, Clean is right. Against this dirty is, clean after all is... dirty is, how can one describe it... dirty is somehow unclear, dirty is by and large, clean at least is, but dirty now that is real."

shits easy to shock

[anonymous]

some or more easily mocked than others

footnote

[robotmummies]

Louis Auchincloss died this week as well, ya know. in this interview with David Carrier he says "Maybe when I’m dead, I’ll be forgiven, but I’m afraid I’ll also be forgotten."
http://bombsite.com/issues/61/articles/2104

Re: footnote

[imomus]

Well, Auchincloss, by being more extreme, in a sense, than any of the writers we're talking about today, reveals the position of our Overton Window, the limits of acceptable rebellion. We were looking at gleeful transgressors and the more reluctant kind who do it because they're realists and want to convey the language of the street. But Auchincloss simply stuck with a 19th century polished, poised, aristocratic articulacy