new & better amphibians

The above phrase leaked into my Twitter feed the other day, I can’t remember from whom or in what circumstances. One of the things about language is that–unless you’re writing about evolution, say, where it might be a useful & charming hyperbole–there can be no meaning to a phrase like that. It’s a grammatically possible but essentially empty group of words: except of course in fantasy & sf, in which the literalisation/reification of empty groups of words is often the major goal, something I always find sad. I’m excited by the sense of a potential for meaning in those circumstances, but not by the closing-off of the possibility by turning a figure of speech into a substitute real.

August Blue

There’s a Trilbyesque tension between piano virtuoso Elsa and her mentor Arthur, who has been controlling from the moment he adopted her, especially around her early attempts to compose music rather than simply interpret the compositions of others. “It was as if he knew I could hear something that he did not understand,” Elsa tells us, “and resented it. As my fingers found the keys, I discovered that I had a point of view. All I had to do to tear it open was listen.” But Arthur doesn’t want that. He wants her to be another instrument, his instrument just as the piano will be hers. He wants her to be a pair of hands insured for a million dollars. Like all mentors he needs to create a legend: Elsa will be his. Given this, we can see she might want to dye her hair blue, fuck up Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto in Vienna, walk offstage and roam the world at will looking for herself.

My Guardian review of August Blue, Deborah Levy’s brilliant ninth novel.

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“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me, and be eaten alive” Audrey Lorde

it’s an emergency

I always think of meaning as emerging from the relations of all the elements in a fiction, not just from a formal structure, based on a line of rational, recognisable causalities that leads to a single site of resolution and closure. Meaning is never just carried by plot. This wiki entry is helpful in thinking of how many possible layers & elements there might be in a fiction, and how complexly the relations & resonances between them might point the reader towards something so organically bedded that it can’t even be called a “direction” but has to be seen as an almost static field–present, perhaps, from the moment the reader reads the first line. Once you recognise that even the most Hollywood formalist product works like this, as well as in its own conventional terms, why wouldn’t you set about removing the conventional terms? If only to see what happened?