A Nanny in Manhattan (Notes on Twee #8)

Rock'n'roll began as teenage music, and all previous attempts to go "back to basics" partook of its original logic of adolescence, i.e. of desire, whether it was teenagers barred from sex and pleasure in the 1950s, working-class youth barred from career opportunities with punk, or radical youth barred from political representation with hardcore.

But twee goes back to an earlier phase, in which all needs are pretty much met, and the ones that aren't are yet to be conceived of. Not all the way back: it's not Rousseauistic naturalness that twee wants (though maybe noise does?). It's that magic time when one has begun the process of acculturation, but hasn't gone too far along. You know what you're supposed to want, but it hasn't yet got inside you. We see this best in the genre's management of gender roles: there are boys and there are girls, and they're dressed differently, but ultimately they don't seem all that distinct.

Supertramp

My review of Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux is up now at Notcoming.

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