Selected Letters from Readers
| September 22, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 06, Number 3, May 1996 |
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PMC Reader’s Report on PMC 6.2
Like every other issue.
People act before they think.
the history of acrylic can be told in terms other than analysis:
polymerization of substance is not a fictive lacquer but an immanent
rechaining of actual potential.
see the movie stalingrad.
war
indeed.
These comments are from: Paul Freedman
The email address for Paul Freedman is: pfreedma@osf1.gmu.edu
First of five letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on Nice Job
This page has been VERY helpful in my 11th grade English research paper, and i just wanted to thank the builder of this site. It’s is hard to find text referances these days. You did a great job and i probably used this source more than any of my others…
These comments are from: Jon Trejo
The email address for Jon Trejo is: nebula@prairienet.org
Second of five letters on this topic
PMC Reader’s Report on critique
Perhaps this imminent frenzy of critical post-production will calm the peripheral aesthetics, where subject remains pure. To the extent that modern creation depends on the eclipse of the real by images, cultural critics would seem especially qualified to analyze it. Elaine Scarry: “it is when art has become to its makers a fiction that critique begins.” If this is the case, if self-esteem arises from an investment in certain fictions, then critics of fiction ought to be able to rule over each of our bodies — and establish the moral and political gravity of their own. What is at issue here are analyses of self and analogies of it. We will burrow into the histories of critique because we will see, or at least want to see, criticism itself as a form of creation. We will project an image of ourselves onto a field of study and recognize our reflection in it. Critics of creation already manipulate the Self of their discourse in order both to attack their violent egoism and to conceive the struggle itself along imaginary lines. Vast energies will be expended not only on the histories and rhetoric of the creation of the Self, but on the mechanism of rhetoric and critical inquiry, on the “violence” of the intellect, on the “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” that, for Nietzsche, make up what is called truth.
These comments are from: Scott Morris
The email address for Scott Morris is: sm92+@andrew.cmu.edu
Third of five letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on Postmodern Culture
Dear Mr. Unsworth:
Just cruising this morning in my favorite area of interest which could be broadly defined as cultural/critical theory and came upon your paper about your efforts at PMC. What I would like to tell you is that although I am a long time home pc dabbler your journal was the primary reason I finally gained access to the internet. I came across some files from it that had been uploaded to a bulletin board (Temple of the Screaming Electron) in california. They fell like manna into a relatively parched, but beautiful, rural environment in which I live. When I finally realized that your magnificent journal was only accessible online I signed up with my local service provider.
I’m a union teamster living in rural Vermont so I don’t have a lot of access to the sort of stuff you have in your journal and you provide access to from your website. Our local library is swell, computerized too, but a computer search under postmodernism or poststructuralism or Derrida or Baudrillard or Jameson produces zero hits.
Thank you.
Finley
Fourth of five letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on Just trying to create communication:
I just wanted you to know that I really appreciate what you are doing.
It would an honor if you keep in touch, or send your messages, and what’s new.
By the way, this is my first time on the Net, so do you know how postmodern issues are touching Music? I mean, for me, I am trying to apply my ways and senses over the music that I am composing, and I have to say, the results are fascinating, even to me.
These comments are from: Issa Boulos
The email address for Issa Boulos is: imad-ibrahim-boulos@worldnet.att.net
Fifth of five letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on Schwartz’s Review of Sex Revolts, PMC 6.2:
In PMC 6.2, Jeff Schwartz raises a particular problematic that is continually grappled with at conferences on popular music and in examining books featuring popular music studies — the serious examination of the music itself. Schwartz’s concerns about mu sicology being “hostile” (with the exception of “radical” musicologists Brett, McClary, and Walser) and cultural studies being “incapable of rigorous engagement,” completely overlooks the role that ethnomusicology may play in the explication of not only t he social/cultural context of popular music, but also the “formal, technical, or semiotic analysis of the medium and texts in question” (Schwartz). I think young ethnomusicologists (like myself) and musicologists are bringing the study of popular music i nto the academy without fear of invalidation. I know it will be necessary to teach music-lovers how to articulate “real” musical information in more musicological and ethnomusicological ways then that currently practiced in general. The American public is being musically educated almost entirely by music critics (i.e., VH1’s Four on the Floor).
My own research in ethnomusicology specializes in popular/vernacular music and gender. I examine issues of gender and popular music from the standp oint of music-making experiences practiced in the everyday and in institutional contexts (i.e., handclapping games, double-Dutch, and the music-making process involved with sampling). Musical analysis or semiotic analysis of music need not be represented as conventional music notation, but there are quite a few advantages to being able to enlighten the “resistant” musicologists by showing them the legitimate structural features of, for example, the musical grooves of Public Enemy through conventional not ation. Or to highlight the complex musical forms located within various genres of popular music, everyday music-making, and to attempt to represent the subjective listening experience so highly prized among popular music affecionados. Schwartz ultimatel y raises a critical issue, which musicology, ethnomusicology, culture studies, and sociology need to seriously engage through actual musical and semiotic analysis of the codes that shape musical sound, the meanings that inflect musical appreciation and di scourse, and the elements of sound the function both within and without modern conventions of music theory and aural cognition of popular music. Popular music studies must move past the constant re-interpretation of fan-dom and star-dom with its stereoty pical gender codes. It’s time to struggle with how pitch, timbre, tone, rhythm, dance, and the more significant compositional process of live and recorded music-making shape and problematize social codes and individual expression of gender, race, ethnici ty, class, kinaesthetics, sexuality, and sexual preference (to name only a few of the dimensions that represent identity in popular music). For example, the music and the roles that women artists play in the creative process as musicians, producers, perf ormers, etc., such as Me-shell Ndege Ocello (bi-sexual neo-funk composer and bass player), Alanis Morisette (eclectic vocalist and composer), Tori Amos (classical pianist and alternative rock composer exploring sexuality and religion), K.D. Lang (lesbian “performance artist” of song), BOSS (gangster rap duo), or the incredible rap finale by Ursula Rucker on The Roots debut CD (1994) are telling us a great deal about problematizing conventions of musical sound, grain of voice, and style that extends beyond popular music and engages the sounds of classical and “world” musics. Ultimately, it’s the music that is turning us on. Making us think about other music and style. Changing our ways of seeing, hearing, and talking about the world, its subcultures, and its people through music. Continuing to privilege the social context of popular music can only serve to perpetuate the hegemonic and dialectical appreciation of Western “high” art music as an autonomous musical phenomenon. I appreciate Schwartz’s review of Sex Revoltsfor publicly acknowledging this critical need in the study of popular music.
These comments are from: Kyra D. Gaunt
The email address for Kyra D. Gaunt is: kgaunt@umich.edu
First of three letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on “The Sex Revolts” review
Bravo! Excellent critique not only of this work but of the genre of “pseudo-musicological” journalistic views of popular music. As a composer and writer on all kinds of music (like Riot Grrrl, etc.), I know well that the writing in this area has been la rgely compiled by journalists, music critics, etc. Even the musicologists you name, however (Brett, McClary and Walser), tend to rely less on their critical faculties when approaching this music (see esp. the use of metaphor in, say, McClary’s “Feminine Endings”). If I may request a response, I’d like to know what you thought of Queer Noises, the new British book on pop music’s undercurrent of homosociality. I, personally, found it less than successful (I don’t even remember the author’s n ame, at this point! Oh, wait, I think it’s John Gill.) Anyway, just curious. Thanks again for the interesting review.
These comments are from: Renee Coulombe
The email address for Renee Coulombe is: rcoulomb@ucsd.edu
Second of three letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on Schwartz: Review of Press/Reynolds’ Sex Revolts
While I’d concur with most of Schwartz’s assessments ofSex Revolts, I wish he’d been able to spend more time on the problems of analyzing specifically musical aspects of pop. While musicological analysis, if wielded carefully, can yield imp ortant insights into the musical workings of pop, its applicability is limited by the terms of its own historical development, as McClary, Walser,et al, point out (even if sometimes they ignore their own advice). The basic problem is that most po st-war popular music, certainly in America and in England, and to varying degrees elsewhere, valorizes texture and rhythm far more than melodic or harmonic information. No big revelation this — but since those last qualities are the qualities around whi ch Western musicological analysis has grown, that analysis is relatively ill-equipped to address what makes pop work: the complex affective semiotics of its rhythmic and textural spatiality, the way the sound hits you.
To resort to impressionistic, vague language here often seems the only alternative to the failure of more rigid, analytical language to come even close to conveying the impact and effects of the music under analysis: it’s like nailing the wind to the wate r. (I succumb to my own diagnosis, it seems . . .)
Sound often begins to seem irreducible, non-repeatable, impossible to reproduce. Rap producers, for instance, often justify sampling as the only way to capture a complete sonic precis of particular old records: only those instruments, those musicians, in that room with those mics, recorded on that board by a particular recording team — and only on that take — bear exactly the sonic signature desired.
If even sound seems incapable of speaking itself, what chance has language — except in its attempt to fray, fuzz, distort its own bounds, in imitation of music itself? Which makes me wonder: why does Schwartz think a more rigorous and scholarly engageme nt with cultural studies thinkers would lead to a less impressionistic account of the workings of the music itself — as his last criticism strongly implies, following immediately upon his critique of Reynolds and Press’s musicological shortcomings? The writers he mentions resort to rather imagistic language in their work on music — while conventional musicology fails notoriously to describe the musicality (as its performers must engage it) even of its native, proper music, the Western art music traditi on.
These comments are from: Jeffrey Norman
The email address for Jeffrey Norman is: jenor@csd.uwm.edu
Third of three letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on [Spinelli’s “Radio Lessons for the Internet,” PMC 6.2]:
I just finished reading the very interesting article comparing the Internet to the early days of radio. I would have to agree with you that the Internet is currently over-utopianized. However, I do believe that the capability of people to become produce rs rather than consumers is very strong on the Internet. For example, imagine if musicians and underground film makers could put their work onto the Internet! I think it would be extremely cool if people could broadcast their work through the Internet, cheaply and with high-quality. However, this might not happen if the protocols of the Internet increasingly become owned by corporations. For example, the premier streaming audio standard on the net is currently RealAudio; do you realize how expensive i t is to buy a RealAudio server? To service only one-hundred people costs something like five or ten thousand dollars; it’s crazy.
But you did raise a very interesting point. Why is the Internet so much more interested in the “process” than the “destination”? And why are most of the discussion groups on the Internet oriented around consumption? Those are two very interesting point s “you” (if I am talking to the writer of this article) brought up.
The thing that always bothers me is: if I could completely recreate society, how would I do so? What am I asking society to do anyway? What is the “good life”?
Is it to make sure no one ever goes hungry? Is it to attempt to achieve the ideal of justice? Personal freedoms?
Is it to better enjoy the material comforts of life, or is it to reach for something higher?
A lot more questions than answers!
Anyway, good article. Hope you have some interesting responses to what I have sent you.
These comments are from: Brad pmc Neuberg
The email address for Brad pmc Neuberg is: bkn3@columbia.edu
First of two letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on “Radio Lessons for the Internet”
The rhetorical tone of early radio and early Internet definitely have striking similarities. However, I would suggest to Mr. Spinelli to also look into the developments in Internet technology to see that the Internet may be headed in the direction of rad io and television.
Without the specific newspaper article next to me, I have read that many cable television providers and even satellite television providers are looking into ways of creating a “cable modem”, a one-way modem that acts as a high speed receiver. While advoc ates of the cable modem point to its significantly higher speed than a traditional phone modem, they also assume that users will spend more time “downloading content” than uploading. As the cable modem provides inexpensive access to most homes (many woul d use an “internet terminal” to browse web sites and launch remote applications), the individual’s ability to transmit information will be just as limited (possibly by only having a phone line out) or eliminated altogther.
Also, the economic limitations of broadcast on the internet are as real as those in radio: an inexpensive FM transmitter and antennae might cost in the $15,000 to $20,000 range for a used transmitter with a 1500 watt capacity. A web server with a fast en ought connection to the internet to allow large numbers of users is similarly priced. However, as an internet user, I can at least transmit responses to other individuals broadcasts and even make information accessible to lay people.
These comments are from: Jack McHale
The email address for Jack McHale is: jmchale4@ix.netcom.com
Second of two letters on this topic.
PMC Reader’s Report on [Barker’s “Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable,” PMC 6.1]
Although perhaps your various digressions on the theme of fragments might at some time and at some place disclose an aperture onto the very view which every fragment, by force or by cunning, forces onto the reader, at least in Nietzsche, it remains an ope n question as to the difference between a fragment and an aphorism. Think, for example, of Novalis, from whom Nietzsche undoubtably received the art of anti-hegelian writing you are so fond of . . . Now, the serious question only begins after you have s aid what you desired to say, namely, can we articulate the difference, and hence the movement, from the fragment to the aphorism. My claim is simple: until you acheive the style of thinking — or writing — where the aphorism sheers away from the mere fr agment, you invariably miss the point of what Blanchot will name the writing of the disaster and Derrida will urge us to call the margin.
These comments are from: Chad Finsterwald
The email address for Chad Finsterwald is: pfinster@acs.bu.edu
PMC Reader’s Report on Paul Mann’s “The Nine Grounds of Intellectual Warfare“
Clausewitz took the extremely difficult subject of warfare and explained it in simple, understandable terms. You have taken a relatively simple concept (“I critique, therefore I’m not!”) and spun so much hyperbole into it that it requires a dictionary an d a case of beer to get through it. I found many pearls of wisdom, but the oyster shells are up around my waist. I wonder if you didn’t fall into the pit you dug for others.
These comments are from: Mike Johnson
The email address for Mike Johnson is: b205s1.ssc.af.mil
PMC Reader’s Report on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
When I stumbled on a remaindered hardbound of Vineland (while working in my local Barnes & Noble non-superstore, since closed) I was amazed that anyone could capture the stresses of trying to keep the experiences of living in the ’60s (in my case, in Central Square, Cambridge MA) as a New Left activist both alive and moving through what has been made of them by their direst opponents (The New Right whose NeoAscendancy now controls Congress). Surely nobody who lived those years and is still l iving them as a forwardable experience has any illusion as to what actually happened, least of all Pynchon. Laborious academicization of the book is a form of engagement, but dissipates its gravity, by breaking it down into a series of discretionary note s. For a non-academic poet & journalist, this acts as an unnecessarily self-checking reduction of what a survivor like myself uses as an encoded, portable experience. I’m not disabled by the ’60s: I’m infuriated by the inability of non-participants to appreciate its continuing effects on the survivors as beneficial. This is no illustrated cartoon history we lived. I might also mention that Vineland is (as was not even noted) in California. We who lived the ’60s in Cambridge, MA had a dr amatically different experience only some of which has been preserved as fiction (by Marge Piercy in Dance the Eagle to Sleep) since we did not intend it to be fictionable while we lived it. Finally, when I sent one of my copies of Vin eland to John Brennan, a Boston College (Class of ’63) classmate who later got his PhD at U.C.-Davis, I inscribed it: “An American Mahabharata.” I suggest you see it as that: a minatory epic of reversals as terrifyingly instructive to warring impe rial clans who knew they were — the 60s was the Civil War of my generation. That the New Right appears to have won is evident; that they will control its history is not, citing this essay as an attempt to refute it. Thanks for the intent. I’m sure Pyn chon appreciates it. I do. Now write it again as a popular article that the general public can digest. The ideological action continues in the Public World, not the rarified section of the illustrated/annotated edition. Pynchon didn’t write Alic e in Wonderland, he wrote Vineland (CA).
These comments are from: Bill Costley
The email address for Bill Costley is: sunset@gis.net