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Introducing: Karl Whitney

Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.

For our money, Karl Whitney is Dublin’s best psychogeographer since James Joyce. Witness, his narrative walks ’round the boundaries of Tallaght, and his search for the hidden waters of the Liberties and St. Patrick’s well, the lost tramways, and Bram Stoker and Ireland’s ghost estates. Karl doesn’t confine himself to Ireland, though. He has written on the Situationists, Parisian streetscapes, and Oulipean Georges Perec. For gorse, Karl runs the Paris of fellow Oulipean Raymond Queneau:

Whereas Queneau’s Paris — the area in which he lived and the place he wrote most about — was located to the west of the city, I was drawn to the east. That’s where the apartment I shared with my girlfriend was, that’s where the library I worked in stood. So when I ran out the door of my apartment building and thought about Queneau’s Paris, I was translating it from west to east: to the storefront petrol stations and pizza joints of the area near place de la Nation. But, as I ran, I was also thinking about the way, in the early 1930s, when work was hard to come by for Queneau as for many others, he picked up a job writing a tiny column for a newspaper. Each day, three, often cryptic, questions about Paris would turn up in L’Intransigent under the heading ‘Connaissez-vous Paris?’ The following day, the answers would be printed below three more questions, and so on. Queneau wrote the column between November 1936 and October 1938, after which he got a job at the publisher Gallimard as a reader.

Bitter satirist

‘Pox and the city: the complex life of Jonathan Swift’ at New Statesman.

What about Swift? Gulliver’s Travels can be read in many different ways: as local satire (on particular political circumstances and scientific fashions), as parody of the kind of pseudo-realistic travel narrative represented by Crusoe, as mockery of utopian visions, as the misanthropic ravings of a furious old man. Three hundred years on, scholars and students still debate whether or not Swift the narrator is directing his irony against Gulliver or the talking horses known as Houyhnhnms (all you need to do is whinny). Or both. The fact the name Gulliver contains the word “gull” – someone who is easily deceived – is a starting point.

We cannot begin to give decent answers to the questions raised by Gulliver’s Travels without a sense of its place in Jonathan Swift’s long and complicated life, which lasted from 1667 (probably) to 1745 (by which time he had already written his own epitaph, the magnificently self-knowing and wittily self-deprecatory Verses on the Death of Dr Swift). The Harvard professor Leo Damrosch’s new biography is to be warmly welcomed. Up until now, the serious student of Swift has had to rely on Irvin Ehrenpreis’s three-volume epic treatment, completed half a century ago. As Damrosch shows in a crisp and exemplary prologue, Ehrenpreis, for all his command of minutiae, was unnecessarily dismissive of certain items of contemporary gossip about Swift and over-confident in his psychoanalytic interpretations.

The boss

Richard Skinner on Satie:

The final key to Satie’s work is the idea of Repetition. In 1949, John Cage went to Paris to find out more about Satie’s music (apart from a few cognoscenti, Satie’s work was unknown at that time) and one of the pieces he discovered was entitled Vexations. Played through once, this rather innocuous piece made up of 36 diminished and augmented chords lasts no more than 2-3 minutes, but Satie had set a trap for the performer by saying that the piece should be played 840 times in succession. To do this, he said, ‘it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities’. If you follow Satie’s instructions, the average time it takes to perform the piece is about 24 hours, which is longer than it would take to perform all his other pieces of music put together.

It might seem like a joke, but Satie was deadly serious and the repetitive nature of all his pieces raises interesting questions about the function of boredom in art. Satie said that ‘boredom is deep and mysterious’. Of Vexations, Cage said, ‘The music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after a while the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begins to set in … It is only boring at first. After a while the euphoria begins to intensify.’

Space maker

In the London Review of Books, T.J. Clark reviews Paul Klee at Tate.

Cubism remained a matrix. Klee realised that others had bent it to their purposes: Mondrian’s sensibility, after all, was as remote from Picasso’s as Klee’s own. In and around 1923 Klee found a way to make even the tight cubist grid do the work he wanted – by inserting enough brighter and lighter squares into the chequerboard, each of them beckoning the eye through the foreground into depth, so that the surface came to look as if it were a kind of transparency ‘really’ hung across a glimpsed infinity on the other side. Once he had the basic idea he often returned to it, varying the size of the squares, the regularity of the grid, the translucency of the veil. The series of glittering watercolours and oils done in 1931 and 1932, using stippled dots or tiny oilpaint tesserae – paintings like Castle Garden or Semi-Circle with Angular Features – strikes me as the high point of this kind of space-making. The Whole Is Dimming (Das Ganze Dämmernd), reads the title of one of them, summing up the vision.

Introducing: Julie Reverb

Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.

Julie Reverb started writing ‘while in bed with a hangover in Spring 2012.’ She says she writes ‘intensely about nothing,’ purely for ‘punches and cadence.’ We believe her. You will too if you follow the trail of her work through some of the best writing venues out there: ‘Pound It’ in Squawk Back, ‘You’ve Got Something on Your Face’ in Calamari Press’ Sleeping Fish, ‘The Bad News First’ in 3:AM Magazine. It’s staggering to think she’s only been at it for a few years.