hoban, solnit, meadows
by uzwi
DGMFS offers Very different approaches to solo accoustic guitar. Nina Allan mourns Russell Hoban. The usual thirteen year old boy is skateboarding in the middle of the street. He gives up after a while, perhaps bored with going “Shhhhhh-tok-CLACK” over & over again, & trucks off towards the river. Reading: A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit. Still reeling from: the final episode of This is England 88. & remember: “There’s still time to engrave an iPad for Christmas”. So get your chisel out now.
the m john harrison blog 
Great selection of acoustic guitar stuff at that link. Glenn Jones’s reference to a ‘Jack’, whom I’m presuming is the late Jack Rose, reminded me how gifted a guitarist Rose was – probably the best of the recent American primitives, able to move from fairly conventional, but sublime, ragtime numbers, to devastating 12 string ragas.
Arguably, that Bill Orcutt’s stuff is so compelling and affecting speaks of the strength of moving away from conventional technique and developing an iconoclastic approach – something he shares with Derek Bailey, who he sounds a little like at times, albeit Derek Bailey being kicked down a flight of stairs. Of course, though, playing around with traditional forms can generate very interesting results – as William Tyler’s recent ‘Behold the Spirit’ shows.
Strange that most contemporary solo acoustic guitar is in an American idiom… But there are some young British guitarists, like Tom James Scott and James Blackshaw, playing in a minimalist classical tradition to powerful effect…
And very sad news about Hoban. ‘Pilgerman’ is certainly one of the most astounding novels about the folly of prejudice ever written.
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
Gotta love Riddley Walker. Of his others that I’ve read, “The Medusa Frequency” stands out.
Candy Rat Records (http://www.candyrat.com/) has an interesting collection of acoustic artists. Antoine Dufour’s a personal favorite, probably because he escapes that “American idiom” in unusual ways. (He’s from Quebec.) Then there’s always Pierre Bensusan who can syncopate a tune unlike anyone else.
And I finally have my excuse to read Hoban, I suppose.
Hi mummifiedstalin. We had quite a discussion about some of the talent at Candyrat, a couple of years ago, here–
https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/candy/
But I’m always up for another visit & Pierre Bensusan is new to me.
Still haven’t managed to snag Solnit’s Lost. Absolutely loved her history of walking.
Hi Simon: She’s one of those writers whose every paragraph seems to articulate something you’ve always felt or thought, better than you ever could. That can be a danger: if you want to be certain your own articulation, poor as it is, stems from your experience rather than her discourse, she’s a “use carefully” thinker. There’s so much reading of this kind available now that I wish, in a way, I was back in the Climbers and “Empty” days, when I was making it up out of the moors & the Huddersfield/Sheffield/Manchester edgelands. (I’m beginning to hate that word, because even more than “psychogeography” it’s so attractive & easy to use but so obviously a gentrifying label, an attempt to plant a flag in the zone–not only are Mabey’s liminal spaces becoming culturally mainstream, there’s a mainstream of liminal space thinking. I’d go further than Robert Macfarlane & say that Edgelands is essentially a coffee table book without pictures, & that a kitsch of liminal zones is now inevitable. I think that’s sad.) Love the new edition of The Unofficial Countryside by the way: thanks so much.
That’s true about Solnit but she does also come from a very different place, and a much more politically engaged history and that does introduce some distance between my articulation and her discourse.
I know what you mean about ‘Edgelands’. I’m only just getting used to the phrase and its relation to living in a city but already I can see it being used as a tag for a certain set of thinking. Just listened to one of Marshman’s audioblogs and there were almost ‘inverted commas’ around his use of it and associated phrases. I’m still enjoying finding my way through that though.
The Unofficial Countryside? You’re very welcome – a small thank you for Empty Space.
>>she does also come from a very different place
Certainly does. But I’m having to watch her for her utterly seductive spin on quotes like “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you ?” Contexting that with the idea of getting deliberately lost, then driving that via the extension “losing yourself” to a final “loss of self”, is far too close to some of my own internal voices since boyhood for comfort. I don’t want to find myself having to disentangle MJH age 7, losing himself “down the fields” or “down the canal”, from a thought of hers (or for that matter, Deakin’s or Macfarlane’s or Mabey’s); it’s bad enough trying to separate him from the later MJH, climbing in one of the Lancashire gritstone quarries with a garbage dump in the next bay along & a pistol club firing live rounds in the one after that… How to prevent the discourse from infecting your use of the space ?
Marshman! I meant to link to him!–
http://www.marshmanchronicles.com/marshman/
How to prevent the discourse from infecting the use of the space? Perhaps go there when its chucking it down, very windy and you’re too cold and miserable to think about anything beyond getting back home? Of course to be sure of eluding the discourse you couldn’t plan for this . . .
Re: being “certain of your own articulation”, the preceding conversation does an admirable job of stating, far more clearly than I ever could, what’s been bothering me about “psychogeography” and “edgelands”. Once a word has been so defined, and there is no slippage, it’s no longer able to evoke anything else than its own reference. Which is great for people who are sure that they want to be sure about things, but not so great for everyone else.