The Rhetoric of Reaction (Notes on Twee #7)

Dignified and Old (Notes on Twee #6)

I suspect that an issue of prime importance in any analysis of twee would be the little matter of how it ages. (Cf. Luna, Calvin Johnson, The Wedding Present.)

Sequelitis

Mirabell: Books of Number is the Ghostbusters II of twentieth-century poetry.

Know Your Onion!

"'Literary! Literary!' complained Ford Madox Ford in a letter to an acquaintance who had sent him a volume of her poems. 'Now that is the last thing that verse should ever be, for the moment a medium becomes literary it is remote from the life of the people, it is dulled, languishing, moribund and at least dead.' … These sentiments are likely to strike us as unexceptionable, for the cultural dispensation under which 'literature' operates as an honorific term and 'literary' as a vaguely pejorative one is well established; but the negative connotation of 'literary' and the coinage of 'literaryism' belong to the late nineteenth century, and by calling upon literature to avoid not the characteristics associated with other types of writing but precisely the things that give a text the appearance of being literature, those terms state the conditions of what would become a familiar avant-garde problem. For a thing that is suspect for looking like itself is an onion that can be peeled indefinitely." 

— Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context, 55

French Toys (Notes on Twee #5)

"French toys: one could not find a better illustration of the fact that the adult Frenchman sees the child as another self. All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.

"…French toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life: the Army, Broadcasting, the Post Office, Medicine (miniature instrument-cases, operating theatres for dolls), School, Hair-Styling (driers for permanent-waving), the Air Force (parachutists), Transport (trains, Citroens, Vedettes, Vespas, petrol-stations), Science (Martian toys).

"The fact that French toys literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all, by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognizes, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult … [F]aced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. He is turned into a little stay-at-home householder who does not even have to invent the mainsprings of adult causality; they are supplied to him ready-made: he has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish."

— Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, 53-54

Did you know

that Kingsley Amis wrote a James Bond novel, under the pen name Robert Markham?

City Kitty (Notes on Twee #4)

Here's a little pop structuralism for you:

"…[C]ultural types which occur in very similar forms in every society, because they are constructed around very simple polarities, are used to fulfill different social functions in different communities … No doubt relationships between any two societies would be made easier if, through the use of some kind of grid, it were possible to establish a pattern of equivalences between the ways in which each society uses analogous human types to perform different social functions." (Tristes Tropiques, 25)

And:

"Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes… only by a miracle can it happen that a journey does not bring about some change or other in this respect." (ibid, 85-86)

Now consider the case of Dean Wareham, born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1963, exported to New York in 1977, starts Galaxie 500 in 1987. Unlike Britain, which has a long history of nancy boy sensitivity in the arts (often also associated with homosexuality and child-cult), or America, where the terms "rock" and "sexual revolution" were polysemous if not synonymous, NZ/Australia are known for a distinctly polarized sexual and musical politics. So Wareham (much like his neighboring countrymen the Go-Betweens) starts from a premise of unquestioned rock masculinity which he is able to cleanly invert, rather than subvert. There's not a trace of inner conflict in Wareham's role reversal: his sweetness is all refusal, no compromise.

Put this sensibility on a plane to America and watch what happens. In his new context, Wareham appears not as eccentric (like Jonathan Richman or Calvin Johnson) nor as effeminate (like Morrissey or Stuart Murdoch) but as a new, available archetype of heterosexual masculinity. Voilà: the rock star as knowing, narcissistic wimp.

(To be expanded.)