Fear of a Deaf Planet: Or Why I Don't Like Alexander Graham Bell

David Call: George and the Dragon

University of Oregon Libraries

 

"As long as we have deaf people on earth, we will have signs."

 

 

I. 

 

Putting aside the fact that I have a strong aversion to making or receiving telephone calls - due more to philosophical reasons tied to the question concerning technology, rather than to social anxiety - I still have good reason to despise the man credited with patenting the first such device in 1876; namely, Alexander Graham Bell.

 

For whilst this Scottish-born inventor was undoubtedly a man of considerable talent - responsible for groundbreaking work in many fields - he was also a fanatic advocate of oralism; i.e., the phonocentric insistence that deaf people abandon the use of sign language (or manualism as it was known amongst reformers in the 19th-century) and communicate primarily (if not exclusively) by mimicking the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech and learning to lipread.    

 

Advocates of oralism, such as Bell, whose mother and wife were both deaf - and whose father, grandfather, and brother were all associated with work on speech and elocution - believed that even those who were born without the ability to hear could - and should - learn to speak; that it was just a question of training (in much the same way as he had once trained the family dog to say How are you, grandmama?) [1].   

 

II. 

 

Now, as someone who has previously attempted to see the world through deaf eyes and opposed audism on several occasions - click here, for example - I obviously find Bell's work as a self-professed teacher of the deaf problematic. 

 

Particularly as he was closely associated with the eugenics movement, which feared the development of a deaf race which, it was believed, threatened the phonocentric basis of society with their sinister use of sign language. In order to prevent this, it was necessary to reduce the deaf race by preventing them from marrying and having children. 

 

To be fair, Bell didn't support the more extreme measures advocated by some. But, in lengthy essays such as Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race (1884) [2], he did openly advocate for oralism and the banning of sign language within schools and wider society. He also wrote lines such as this: 

 

"Those who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy." [3]

 

Utimately, Bell wanted the integration not the elimination of deaf people. Nevertheless, the image of an insular, inbred, and proliferating deaf race was a pernicious fantasy that was repeated for many years and such surdophobia [4] was carefully exploited by those promoting the ideology of oralism. 

 

Thus, Bell is not regarded positively by those within the deaf community today and I understand why deaf artists and activists, such as David Call, have depicted him in a less than flattering light, as the image above illustrates [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Actually, it was a trick: having taught the poor dog to growl continuously, Bell would reach into its mouth and manipulate the animal's lips and vocal cords to produce a crude series of sounds. Listeners were then persuaded to believe that the dog was talking. 

 

[2] In this work, Bell issued a warning that deaf people were effectively forming an alternative society, by intermarrying and socialising with one another. Like others, he was even led to the conclusion that a deaf race was in the process of evolving - despite evidence to the contrary put forward by those who, for example, pointed out that although deafness can be an inherited condition, only a small percentage of deaf couples have deaf children.  

[3] The irony was that Bell was himself able to use sign language; even though, he strongly opposed it. In fact, his last word was signed to his deaf wife Mabel on his deathbed.

 

[4] Surdophobia is a term recently coined by Gardy van Gils, a deaf researcher at Utrecht University. She defines it as a form of hostile intolerance for deaf individuals, or an irrational fear of the deaf community resulting in opposition to the use of sign language. 

 

[5] This image by David Call - linocut on paper - was purchased by the University of Oregon in 2019 from the Eye Hand Studio. It shows the American educator, filmmaker, and activist George Veditz slaying A. G. Bell depicted as a dragon. 

      Veditz, the son of German immigrants, lost his hearing aged eight due to scarlet fever. He served as the seventh President of the National Association of the Deaf from 1904 to 1910 and is celebrated within the deaf community today as one of the most passionate and visible advocates of American Sign Language. His film "Preservation of the Sign Language" (1913) was added to the US National Film Registry in 2010. In it, Veditz not only makes a strong defense of the right of the deaf people to use sign language, but also talks of its beauty and complexity as a valid form of human communication. 

 

 

Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen

Autumn-Foliage-Strike-Fun

 

 

It's often said that the Greeks have a word for everything, but, as a matter of fact, that's not true [1].

 

Fortunately, however, when the Greeks fail us, the Germans are usually ready and willing to step up to the mark with a compound noun ... [2]

 

Thus, when Maria was unable to supply a term for the pleasure of kicking through autumn leaves - something that I enjoy as much now at sixty as I did at six years of age - I immediately consulted with my friend in Berlin and she was happy to text the following: Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen ... [3]

 

There's something profoundly impressive about the German ability to capture in a single word a relatively complex idea or emotion that would take an English speaker a whole sentence to explain; no wonder Heidegger insisted that German is uniquely qualified for the task of thinking [4] (he wasn't simply trying to piss off certain French intellectuals).    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have even used this idiomatic expression myself on Torpedo the Ark; see the post of 27 September 2020, for example, in which I briefly discuss the 1930 stage play by Zoe Akins from which the phrase derives: click here.

[2] See Ben Schott, Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition (Blue Rider Press, 2013); an amusing dictionary of neologisms that capture the idiosyncrasies of life as only the German language can.  

 

[3] It's pronounced: hairbst-laowb-tritt-fair-gnuu-ghen.   

 

[4] Whilst Heidegger never actually said that if you want to think you have to do so exclusively in German, he did argue that German, like ancient Greek, but unlike Latin - the language of metaphysical philosophy - is particularly suited to thinking because it's phenomenologically well grounded. 

      See Heidegger's famous interview with Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wollf from Der Spiegel (conducted on 23 September, 1966; published posthumously on 31 May, 1976): click here to read the English translation by William J. Richardson under the title 'Only a God Can Save Us'. 

 

 

Feisty One I'm Not!

 

The other day, at an event held at the National Poetry Library [1], I asked a perfectly reasonable question of the speakers (at their invitation). 

 

The question was pretty much brushed aside, but I was thanked for providing a feisty contribution to the evening. 

That word - feisty - irritated me at the time and has been troubling me ever since: for I am not a small farting dog looking to cause a stink and don't wish to be patronised as such [2].

 

I'm assured it was meant lightheartedly and in the modern sense. 

 

However, when middle-class people label working-class people feisty, then - even if unaware of the carminative origins of the word - it's insulting in much the same way as the word uppity is a highly offensive way of describing black people [3].

 

For the implication is given that those who dare to challenge the prevailing narrative are behaving in a manner that is just a little too rude and aggressive for polite society and next time might think twice before speaking (or even remain silent altogether in the presence of those who are clearly their superiors) [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For details, click here.  

[2] Etymologically, feisty means something quite different from its modern sense; relating as it does to the breaking of wind and to canine flatulence in particular. See the entry on the term in the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary: click here.  

 

[3] See the article by Elspeth Reeve, 'Yep, "Uppity" Is Racist', in The Atlantic (22 November 2011): click here.

 

[4] There's arguably also a subtle sexism operating behind this word feisty when used by a man to describe a woman. See Melissa Mohr's article of 10 September 2020, on the Christian Science Monitor website: click here. 

A Feisty Evening with Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson and D. H. Lawrence

Isobel Dixon, Douglas Robertson & D. H. Lawrence

 

 

I. 

 

A couple of nights ago, I went to the National Poetry Library - which, for those who don't know, is housed on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre - for what was billed as a D. H. Lawrence celebration, with particular focus being given to the collection of poems entitled Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).

 

The event also called attention to a recent book by the South African poet Isobel Dixon, produced in collaboration with the highly acclaimed Scottish artist Douglas Robertson who provided a dozen finely detailed illustrations: A Whistling of Birds (Nine Arches Press, 2023).

 

II. 

 

Whilst this work is essentially a response to Lawrence's text - and his short essay 'Whistling of Birds' (1919) lends the book its name - Dixon also invites others, including William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes into the conversation, whilst still finding time to make her own distinctive voice heard. 

 

It's a work that will leave the majority of members of the D. H. Lawrence Society very happy, as it uncritically reinforces the idea of Lawrence as a nature lover in the English Romantic tradition and a poet with an almost uncanny ontological insight into the essence of birds, beasts, and flowers. 

And in their hour long presentation at the NPL, this idea of Lawrence was further reinforced; it was almost as if the important challenge thrown down by the Indian author Amit Chaudhuri twenty-odd years ago to read Lawrence's poetry in light of poststructuralist theory has been completely forgotten [1].

 

Which is profoundly unfortunate in my view. For it results in an interpretation of Lawrence that not only fails to understand the radical nature of his aesthetic, but means he is sold short as a thinker-poet whose primary object is language. 

 

It's because Lawrence writes so well, that we believe he has captured the true nature or being of a snake, for example, when, actually, he dissolves such essentialism based on the idea of a fixed identity into a game of difference and becoming - which is why philosophers including Derrida and Deleuze are such admirers of Lawrence's poetry [2].     

 

 

III. 

 

Just to be clear: I enjoyed the event and wish Dixon and Robertson every success with their book (which has already garnered considerable praise).

 

However, they disappointed by refusing to take Lawrence seriously as a writer; preferring instead to think of him in all too human terms (thus the frequent references to biographical details, as if these somehow might illuminate the text or explain away its complex and often troubling character). 

They also disappointed by dismissing Lawrence's work as a painter in a lighthearted manner, saying it simply wasn't very good. Again, without wanting to go into too much detail here - as I've written at length on this subject elsewhere - this simply betrays an ignorance of what it is Lawrence is attempting to do on canvas; namely, produce an art of sensation that is concerned with the invisible forces and flows that shape the flesh via what Deleuze terms a very special violence. 

 

His is a non-representational depiction of the body without organs and therefore Lawrence is not overly concerned with anatomical fidelity, or reducing figures to the level of optical cliché. In other words, he is not trying capture a likeness and, by his own admission, his pictures are rolling in faults of technique - but that doesn't matter; Lawrence is not so much interested in that which is merely true-to-life, but that which is more true-to-life (we might call this phallic realism).   

 

In sum: just as Lawrence's poetry is primarily involved with language and the assembling of textual abstractions, his painting is involved with colour, line, and the forces of chaos; a violence that works upon the flesh and upon the canvas, distorting and deforming bodies and liberating pictures from the tyranny of the stereotype; a violence that knows nothing of symbolism or signification and cares nothing for narrative or illustration (for if painting has no model to depict, neither has it a story to tell).

 

Lawrence may not be a great painter, or even a very good one. But he's a better one than his critics realise - and a far more intelligent and sophisticated writer than they think him too.   

  

One of Robertson's illustrations for A Whistling of Birds (2023) feat. a squirrel 

next to Lawrence's astonishing Ink Sketch (1929) feat. a nude man and woman 

within a field of rhythm and desire demonstrating how waves 

of inorganic life exceed the bounds of organic activity.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003). 

      I have discussed this book and made reference to it elsewhere on this blog: click here. I might not agree with everything Chaudhuri says, but this is an important text whose challenge to the (almost wilfully naive) manner in which Lawrence is usually portrayed and his writing interpreted has still not been met by many within the Lawrence world.

 

[2] See for example Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press, 2009).

      Readers might also be interested in a post dated 17 July 2015 on Lawrence, Derrida, and the snake: click here.

 

 

Re the use of the word feisty in the title of this post: click here. 

 

This post is for Chloe Rose Campbell and Tamara Ber.   

 

Halloween at the Kit Kat Club 1984/2024

Kit Cat Club Halloween Special: Sat. 26 Oct 2024

 omearalondon.com

 

 

I was amused to see that even ageing goth clubbers like to mark anniversaries and can be a bit wistful for times gone by; it makes these creatures of the night trying so hard to appear undead and vampiric reassuringly all too human after all. 

 

Anyway, for one night only, the famous Kit Kat Club [1] was reincarnated on Saturday for a Halloween special in the hope that it might be possible to summon the alternative spirit of the mid-1980s with a musical mix of post-punk, dark disco, and synthpop. 

 

The strictly enforced dress code consisting of  glam-goth, cyber, industrial, fetish, drag, burlesque, steampunk, etc. is apparently in place to protect the club's status as edgy and avant-garde and encourage individual imagination and diversity [2].

 

One can't help thinking, however, that its real aim is to create a safe space for those who, for whatever reason, feel threatened by street wear and casual clothing; as if a single pair of trainers might somehow challenge their beautifully crafted aesthetic and dispell the whole illusion of the night. 

 

According to an online flyer for the event (see above): 'There will also be legacy guests, fashionistas, Glampires, a Monsterlune Catwalk Show, two live bands and a dedicated area where we can immerse ourselves in nostalgia, with visuals, photos and music evoking memories of those classic '80s nights that defined a generation.'

 

Unsure if such a gathering would delight the original founder and godfather of goth Simon Hobart [3], or have him spinning in his grave, I decided to give it a miss. 

 

Besides, I've never been much of a clubber and was never really a goth. Although, having said that, there were gothic elements to my look in this period; as can be seen in the photo below taken on 31 October 1984, when, concidently, I paid my one and only visit to the Kit Kat ... [4]

 

 

S. A. von Hell looking a bit post-punk gothic

(Halloween 1984) 

 

Notes

 

[1] Operating out of a "converted warehouse known as the Pleasure Dive in Westbourne Grove", the Kit Kat would quickly become "London's premier goth hangout, providing a more glamorous and tongue-in-cheek alternative to its more po-faced rival, the Batcave in Soho".

      Lines quoted from David Hudson's obituary for Simon Hobart in The Guardian (2 November, 2005): click here.

 

[2] I'm actually paraphrasing from a statement concerning the dress policy of the Torture Garden, not the Kit Kat, though I'm sure both venues would justify their dress codes on the same grounds. See my post on Europe's largest fetish club published on 12 December, 2012: click here.

 

[3] Simon Hobart - who would go on to become a crucial figure on the gay club scene in London - launched the Kit Kat Club in February 1984. Following a huge police raid (intended to discover drugs) in January 1985, 20-year-old Hobart found himself on the front page of The Sun where he was described as the 'Godfather of Goth'. Sadly, Hobart died in 2005 (aged 41). See the obituary by David Hudson cited in note [1].

 

[4] Unfortunately, I don't remember much about my visit and, if my diary entry from 31 October 1984, can be trusted my experience of the Kit Kat was entirely uneventful; much as I'd like to report that I copped off with Princess Julia that night, I left at the relatively early time of 1.30 am and caught the nightbus home.

      Note that the photo was taken earlier that day in Soho Square (and not at the club).   

 

 

Eros und Freundschaft: Notes on the Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger-Walter Benjamin Triangle

Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

 

 

I.

 

At a 6/20 talk the other day on Walter Benjamin [1], some clever clogs in the audience posed the following thought experiment:

Imagine that Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin were both hanging perilously from a cliff edge and she could save the life of only one man; whose hand would Hannah Arendt reach for? 

 

This raised a few knowing laughs in the room, but it is, as a matter of fact, a perfectly serious question; one which obliges us to ponder where her ultimate loyalty lay: to her lover, or to a friend to whose cousin she was married?

 

Without guaranteeing that we'll arrive at a definitive answer, I thought it might be instructive nevertheless to examine the relationships between these three fascinating figures ...

 

 

II. 

 

Let's begin with a few remarks on the woman at the centre of this philosophical threesome and her relationship with Heidegger, who was not only a married man seventeen years her senior, but also her university tutor.

 

Born in Germany in 1906, Hannah was a pretty and brilliantly precocious Jewish child raised in a secular and progressive family, mostly by her mother, Martha (her father having died from syphilis when she was just seven years old) along strict Goethean lines.

 

Fiercely independent, Hannah studied classical literature and founded a philosophy circle whilst still at school, having read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason before her fourteenth birthday. After completing her secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under newly appointed professor Heidegger, with whom she formed a romantic as well as a close intellectual relationship exchanging love letters and philosophical ideas.

 

Indeed, despite everything that was to happen, Heidegger remained one of the most profound influences on her own work and Arendt continued to acknowledge him as the secret king ruling over the realm of thought (just as he would later confess that she had been the inspiration for his work on thinking as a form of passion) [2]. 

 

They remaind friends until his death in 1976. 

 

III.   

 

In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Siegmund Stern (aka Günther Anders), who, like her, had been a student of Heidegger's (they had first met in 1925, although she took little notice of him at the time). 

 

As mentioned, he also happened to be Benjamin's cousin and, during Arendt's exile in Paris from Hitler's Germany during the 1930s, she and Benjamin became close friends (but not, as far as I'm aware, lovers).  

 

Walter Benjamin is something of an odd duck: as Arendt recognised in the long introduction she wrote in 1955 to a collection of essays by Benjamin known in English as Illuminations [3]. 

 

In this text, she attempts to explain Benjamin's fate as a posthumous individual - i.e. one who, as Nietzsche says, only comes into their own after they die - by referencing his incomparable genius and the fact that this made it difficult to classify his writing. 

 

Not quite this and not quite that, Benjamin was someone who thought both poetically and philosophically, but without being either a poet or a philosopher. 

 

But Benjamin was also, according to Arendt, cursed with bad luck; he himself used to speak of the 'little hunchback' [bucklicht Männlein] who bedeviled him from earliest childhood and caused him to appear as a bit of a bungler (or what our American friends refer to as a screw-up). 

 

Who knows, perhaps this was one of the things Arendt found so attractive about him; hugely gifted, but, like Proust, unable to change a lightbulb, let alone the circumstances of his life; even when the latter threatened to crush him. Some women love winners; some women love losers.           

 

At any rate, Arendt and Benjamin - shared a certain vision of modernity (and, indeed, an angelic concept of history) and they loved to converse and exchange ideas, or play chess together. She admired the older man's "gestures and the way he held his head when listening and talking; the way he moved, his manners, but especially his style of speaking, down to his choice of words and the shape of his syntax; finally, his downright idiosyncratic tastes" [4]. 

 

But did she care for Benjamin (her friend) with the same intensity and devotion with which she cared for Heidegger (her former lover)? 

 

I doubt it. 

 

In fact, I doubt she even cared for her husband with the same passion (whom she divorced in 1937) and it's arguable that what she liked about the cousins was that they each reminded her in some way of Heidegger (whom Benjamin always regarded as his nemesis) [5]. 

 

Thus, despite the 6/20 speaker, Anja Steinbauer, expressing her hope that it would be Benjamin's hand Arendt would grab in the imaginary clifftop scenario set out above, I strongly suspect it would in fact be the latter's. 

 

Notes

 

[1] The paper, by Dr. Anja Steinbauer on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (1927-1940), was given at the 6/20 Club (London) on Sunday 20 October, 2024, hosted (as always) by Christian Michel, a French polymath who has graciously organised twice-monthly events at his west London home for twenty-odd years, during which time an impressive assortment of speakers have presented papers on a huge number of topics.  

 

[2] As might be imagined, Arendt faced a good deal of criticism for her continued admiration of Heidegger due to his involvement with (and support for) the Nazi Party after his election as rector at Freiburg University in 1933. But good on her, I say; isn't this evidence that love ultimately triumphs over ideology?

      For Arendt's description of Heidegger as the hidden king, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), p. 44. It was this work that first revealed their love affair, although it wasn't until 1995 that Elżbieta Ettinger published her controversial work on the relationship having gained access to their correspondence. 

      In 1998, all the letters between Hannah and Heidegger were finally published. See the English translation by Andrew Shields; Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters, 1925-1975, ed. Ursula Ludz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004).

 

[3] Originally published in German as Schriften, this collection of essays, edited by Arendt, was translated into English by Harry Zorn and published as Illuminations by Jonathan Cape in 1970. 

 

[4] Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (The Bodley Head, 2015), pp. 24-25. 

 

[5] See Andrew Benjamin and Dimitris Vardoulakis (eds.), Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (SUNY Press, 2015), a collection of essays which considers points of affinity and friction between these two thinkers. 

      It's interesting that, despite being contemporaries, neither man directly engaged with the work of the other, even though Arendt was keen to point out that Benjamin actually shared more common philosophical ground with Heidegger than he did with his Marxist friends; see her introduction to Illuminations, p. 50.

Magic's Back: Evoking the Ghosts of Malcolm McLaren's Oxford Street

Malcolm McLaren's The Ghosts of Oxford Street (1991): 

'It was meant to be great, but it's horrible.'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Malcolm, one of the things he liked to spend his time doing as an art student was making petit cadeaux out of bricks: 

 

"'I decorated each one with ribbons to which I attached a little tag reading: Magic's Back. Then I'd go out at night and hurl them through the church windows [...] in the hope that a priest would pick one up and read the message.'" [1]

 

II. 

 

This act of pagan vandalism - which McLaren thought of as conceptual art - was later dramatised in the Channel 4 1991 Christmas special The Ghosts of Oxford Street  - a bizarre 53 minute film written by McLaren and Rebecca Frayn and starring (amongst others) Tom Jones, Sinéad O'Connor, and Shane MacGowan.

 

McLaren also narrated and (mis)directed the work and, as in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), made a camp and slightly creepy attempt at acting, whilst prowling about the West End at night like a Dickensian phantom dressed in a dark velvet suit, hat, cloak, and mask. 

 

Even as a McLaren fan, I have to say it was a bit much: by which I mean - not to put too fine a point on it - disappointingly shit. The concept - based on an unfinished student project from twenty-two years earlier [2] - was typically brilliant, but what ended up on the screen was often just embarrassing. 

 

McLaren's (sympathetic) biographer Paul Gorman notes:

"The Ghosts of Oxford Street bears all the marks of a difficult production, but there are several bright points, including the biographical elements such as the conflation of McLaren's childhood visits to Selfridges with the King Mob Christmas invasion of 1968." [3]

However, Gorman admits that "the narrative arc was fragmented and McLaren proved too cloying a presence". Worse, the film's finale - "a masquerade inside Marks & Spencer on the site of the Pantheon" - was a "damp squib" [4].

 

Gorman also quotes McLaren's retrospective dismissal of the project as a "'pathetic Christmas musical'" [5] made purely for the money (though that's clearly not true; the memories, obsessions, and ideas explored in the film were very much his own). 

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, unlike The Snowman (1982), The Ghosts of Oxford Street hasn't become a festive favourite and is rarely repeated on TV. However, those who wish to do so can watch it on the Channel 4 catch-up service, My4: click here.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Malcolm McLaren, quoted in Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 114. 

 

[2] See Gorman's biography, chapter 8, pp. 108-113 for details of this psychogeographic project.

 

[3] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren ... p. 645. 

      Gorman also commends the reimagining of McLaren's pagan vandalism and the fact that the script retained elements of Situationist theory.  

[4] Ibid., pp. 645-646.

[5] Ibid., p. 646.

 

 

Musical bonus: Malcolm McLaren (feat. Alison Limerick), 'Magics Back' (Theme from The Ghosts of Oxford Street), written and produced by Malcolm McLaren, Mike Stock, and Pete Waterman (RCA, 1991): click here.

 

There She Blows! Carry On Columbus

The Carry On Album, featuring the compositions of Bruce Montgomery 

and Eric Rogers, performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, 

conducted by Gavin Sutherland (White Line, 1999) 

Carry On Columbus, single by Fantastic Planet 

(written and produced by Malcolm McLaren and Lee Gorman) 

(A&M Records, 1992)

 

The music for the majority of the Carry On films - and there are thirty-one in total, made between 1958 and 1992 [1] - was written by just two composers: Bruce Montgomery and Eric Rogers. 

 

The former provided scores for the first six films, from Carry On Sergeant (1958) to Carry on Cruising (1962) and wrote the instantly recognisable Carry On theme - click here - that was adapted and given a bit more swing by the latter, who composed the scores for twenty-three Carry On films, from Carry On Cabby (1963) to Carry On Emmanuelle (1978).  

 

Their work for the Carry On movies may not be the most sophisticated film music, but it's arguable that without their contribution the series wouldn't have been as popular or as long-running and both men surely deserve more recognition for their work than they have been afforded. 

 

As one commentator has rightly noted: "It is through [their] music that every structural aspect of the Carry On films is brought to life. " [2]

 

Interestingly, sometimes the films incorporated a song into the opening credits; Carry on Cowboy (1965) and Carry on Screaming! (1966) being two examples that immediately come to mind. But perhaps the most surprising of Carry On songs was the one played over the closing credits to nobody's favourite film, Carry on Columbus (1992) ...

 

 

II. 

 

 

Carry On Columbus was the final release in the Carry On franchise; or, if you prefer, the final nail in the coffin of a film series that had died two decades earlier. 

 

Unfortunately, I can't say how bad it is, as I've never managed to watch more than a few minutes. 

 

However, I'm willing to accept the BFI's listing of it as amongst the series' bottom five films, although I'd reject the claim made by some that it's the worst British film ever made (even if it does include amongst its cast a number of so-called alternative comedians) [3]. 

 

But - and not a lot of people know this - the film did provide us with a song written and produced by Malcolm McLaren and ex-Bow Wow Wow bass player Leigh Gorman [4] that fused various genres of music into an insane hard house track a million miles away from the work of Rogers and Montogomery, but which, nevertheless had something anarchic and comical about it.

 

If it wasn't quite right for a Carry On movie, it nevertheless betrayed its origins in the earlier work of McLaren and Leigh with its sampling of sounds echoing their past recordings; for example, the incorporation of the classical piece Asturias, by Spanish composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz, reminded one of McLaren's work on Fans (1984), whilst, as Paul Gorman points out, the vocals provided by Jayne Collins were yelped in a manner reminiscent of Annabella Lwin [5]. 

 

Anyway, those who are intrigued may click here to play the extended edit that appears on the 12" single (along with three other mixes of Carry On Columbus) [6].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] All thirty-one of which were produced by Peter Rogers and directed by Gerald Thomas. The Carry On franchise is the most successful series of comedy films in British cinema history. As one scholarly commentator notes: 

      "Like most aspects of popular culture, these films were not original; they wallowed in a collection of tried and tested comic ideals and stereotypes, owing something to nearly every genre of comedy which had gone before. And yet the 'Carry On' series quickly established itself as something rather special; something which was uniquely and affectionately British, and remains so to this day." 

      See Peter Edwards, 'Carry On Composing! The Music of the 'Carry On' Films (1958-78)', posted on the Robert Farnon Society website (25 May 2014): click here.

 

[2] Peter Edwards, as cited above. As Edwards goes on to note: "Every aspect of the comedy - the spoofs, the naughty situations, the larger-than-life characters and caricatures, the verbal and visual jokes - is presented by the composer in his score."

 

[3] Alternative comedy was a term coined in the 1980s for a style of politically-correct humour that rejected the discriminatory and stereotypical character of mainstream comedy. Unfortunately, it's chief exponents - several of whom appeared in Carry on Columbus - simply weren't funny. Ultimately, the British public rightly value Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey over Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, and Julian Clary.

 

[4] Gorman's first name was misspelt as Lee on record label of Carry on Columbus (1992). 

[5] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p, 649. 

      Gorman also explains how McLaren became involved with Carry On Columbus - he had been "introduced to the film's producer John Goldstone by a mutual acquaintance, the BBC arts correspndent Alan Yentob" (649).

 

[6] These other mixes are a techno-heavy 'android mix'- Ooh, Matron! - and (on the B-side) the 'new love baby vocal mix' and 'new love baby instrumental mix'.     

It's Your Verses That We Want and Your Verses We Shall Have! Notes on Plagiarism, Piracy, and Found Poetry

 

'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, 

and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Coming as I do from a punk anarchist tradition [2], I'm pretty much of the view that all property - including intellectual property - is theft and that piracy is a swashbuckling method of redistributing gold and cultural capital.

 

And I have little sympathy when bourgeois poets complain about plagiarism, bleating that such an illicit compositional technique is an assault upon originality of expression and the authenticity of experience (i.e., their artistic integrity). 

 

I can see there's something slightly shameful about covert plagiarism, when an attempt is made to hide or disguise what one's doing; if you're going to steal, then do so like Willie Brodie for the sake of the danger and to liberate ideas, not merely so that you might pass off something taken as your own. 

But if you're upfront and open about what you're doing - if your plagiarism is overt and you make no secret of the fact that you located your materials here, there, and everywere - then that seems admirable to me. 

 

In fact, I'm something of a fan of so-called found poetry ...

 

 

II.

 

Found poetry is verse created by recontextualising words, lines, and even whole passages purloined from elsewhere and then making a number of crafty modifications to the text in order to give it fresh meaning or look. How and to what extent the poem is changed - or treated, as they say in the trade - is really up to the finder.    

 

In a sense, a found poem is the literary equivalent of the readymades that Duchamp and the Dadaists foisted on the art world over a century ago. I don't know if he was the first to hit on the technique, but the great American writer and artist Bern Porter famously published Found Poems with the Something Else Press in 1972 [3] and it's him that I initially think of whenever the subject comes up.   

 

 

III.

 

Having found a text to work on, there are several ways one might then begin to fuck with it, including  ...  

 

(i) Erasure

 

Poems produced by erasure have had words from an existing text redacted or blacked out, thereby producing a new work whilst at the the same time making us curious about what has been concealed.

 

Thus, whilst erasure may subvert the question of authorship, it nevertheless acknowledges (and draws attention to) an original text and perhaps raises political questions around censorship, secrecy, and the control of information. 

 

The name often associated with the technique is Doris Cross, who, in 1965, famously placed certain columns from a 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary under erasure [4]. 

 

(ii) Patchworking

 

A cento is a poetical patchwork entirely composed of verses, passages, or simply short fragments taken from an author (or several authors), then stitched into a new body of text à la Dr. Frankenstein. 

 

It's a very old form, originating in the 3rd or 4th century (if not earlier), but it's one that is still explored and experimented with today by writers such as myself [5]. 

 

(iii) Découpé

 

This is what we call in English a cut-up technique; i.e., one that involves a lot of textual snipping and rearranging in order to create what is known as an aleatory narrative; i.e., a story that incorporates chance or randomness into its composition and/or structure. 

 

William Burroughs and his pal Brion Gysin popularized this technique in the 1950s and 1960s, although it can be traced back to the Dadaists of the 1920s (Tristan Tzara was a fan of such instant poetry). 

 

It has since been used by many scissor-wielding artists in a wide variety of contexts, though those who think that découpé might magically reveal a text's implicit content or true meaning are being ridiculous [6]. 

 

In closing, let me express my admiration for Deleuze's attempt to transform the cut-up into a rather more promiscuous (and less learned) pick-up technique. As he writes: 

 

"You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other." 

 

Deleuze continues:  

 

"You don't have to be learned, to know or be familiar with a particular area, but to pick up this or that in areas which are very different. [...] Burroughs' cut-up is still a method of probabilities - at least linguistic ones - and not a procedure [...] which combines the heterogeneous elements" [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'Philip Massinger', essay in The Sacred Wood, (Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1920), p. 114.

 

[2] That is to say, an anarchist tradition that owes more to Malcolm McLaren than it does to Proudhon. 

 

[3]   In 1972, Bern Porter published Found Poems via Something Else Press. It features hundreds of found poems selected from newspapers, ads and everyday printed matter, some involving collage techniques, others displayed as readymades. 

 

[4] For an interesting attempt to answer the question 'Who Is Doris Cross?' by Lynn Xu posted on the Poetry Foundation website (25 April 2014): click here. 

[5] See the post: 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' (6 March, 2022): click here. 

[6] Burroughs was drawn towards the idea of a text being invested with unconscious meaning. He also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination: 'When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.' That seem's doubtful, although it's a nice thought. 

      I found this line from Burroughs in the 'Translator's Introduction' to Síomón Solomon's Hölderlin's Poltergeists (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 14.  

 

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 10.   

On My Convoluted Relationship With Walter Benjamin

 Walter Benjamin and Stephen Alexander illumined by

Paul Klee's blessed Angelus Novus (1920)

 

 

Readers familiar with this blog will know that I have a thing for writers whose names begin with the letter B: from Baudelaire to Baudrillard; and from Georges Bataille to Roland Barthes [1].  

 

To this list might also be added the name of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish cultural critic and theorist whose convoluted (unfinished) work about Paris as the capital of the nineteenth-century - known in English as The Arcades Project (1927-40) [2] - affirms the figure of the flâneur as having crucial philosophical significance. 

 

Often regarded as a seminal text for postmodernism, the Arcades Project also anticipates the world of blogging and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that, in some ways, Torpedo the Ark is my very own version of Benjamin's posthumously edited and published masterpiece [3].  

 

For example, like the Arcades Project, TTA relies heavily on compositional techniques including paraphrase, pastiche, and plagiarism [4] - affirming the idea of intertextuality and attempting to create a kind of literary-philosophical collage that defies any attempt to systematise ideas or enforce any kind of grand narrative.    

 

Like Benjamin, I dream of being able to simply stroll through the ruins and piece together found fragments of text from old works by dead authors, thereby creating something new and idiosyncratic, but not something that pretends to be an entirely original work born of individual uniqueness or any such Romantic fantasy. TTA is shaped by (functions and circulates within) a wider cultural history and a shared linguistic network of meaning.

And, like the Arcades Project, TTA has grown and mutated in a monstrous manner. Initially, Benjamin envisioned wrapping things up within a few weeks. However, as the work expanded in scope and complexity, he eventually came to view it as his most important achievement. 

 

Similarly, when I began TTA I thought it would provide a window on to a wider body of work. But it then became the work, absorbing huge amounts of time and energy and without any conceivable end point other than death (the final post may very well be a suicide note) [5].

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post dated 17 August 2022 in which I discuss these four French writers: click here.   

 

[2] Das Passagen-Werk consists of a massive assemblage of notes, fragments, and quotations that Benjamin assembled between 1927 and his death in 1940. The manuscript (along with additional material) for the Arcades Project was entrusted to Benjamin's pal Georges Bataille when the former fled Paris following the Nazi occupation. Bataille, who worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, hid the manuscript in a closed archive at the library where it was eventually discovered after the war. The full text was published in an English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999, having been first published in a German edition in 1982. 

 

[3] There are, of course, some important differences between Benjamin and myself and our respective projects. For one thing, my work has been influenced less by Jewish mysticism and Marxism and more by Jewish comedy and the punk philosophy of Malcolm McLaren.

 

[4] I know the idea of plagiarism is one that some readers balk at. However, it's one I'm happy to endorse; see the post entitled 'Blurred Lines' (21 January, 2016): click here. And see also the post 'On Poetry and Plagiarism' (13 December, 2018): click here. 

 

[5] Readers unfamiliar with the biographical details of Benjamin's story, may be interested to know Benjamin ended his own life, aged 48, on 26 September, 1940, in Portbou, Spain (a small coastal town just over the border with France). Fearing he was about to fall into the hands of the Gestapo, who had been given orders to arrest him, Benjamin chose to overdose on a handful of morphine tablets. 

 

 

This post is for Anja Steinbaum and Natias Neutert.