WRITING I'VE ENJOYED RECENTLY

Recently, in addition to the brief return to life of K-Punk (!!), I've enjoyed two posts by Mark Richardson on his relationship to the work of David Lynch. The first is on Lynch on Lynch, the inspiration for Eraserhead, and the dread of responsibility, while the second is on The Elephant Man and its intersection with Richardson's family and life. I'm not a huge Lynch fan--I've seen Blue Velvet and I think it's a good movie, and what I've seen of Twin Peaks has been pretty great--so the draw is mostly the writing itself in the pieces. Both of them aren't exactly new ground for him--in fact, they're variations on a theme that he's pretty much made his own at this point through his "Resonant Frequency" column at Pitchfork--but they are perfect illustrations of what I love about his writing. I guess it's actually just a feature common to all good writing, in a way, the ability to start from a small moment and, through a gradual accumulation of details, to arrive not at a big revelation or a capital-t Truth, but an understanding of the way those various small moments and experiences come to bear the weight of our everyday lives. For whatever reason--there are probably several--I find that what he writes often feels right to me. And, in a way that I'm not sure I could articulate very well, his writing feels very contemporary to me beyond the level of strict content, which very often is of-the-minute music. It engages with those bits of culture in a way that I recognise as a common way of engaging with culture at this moment, I guess.

In a "Resonant Frequency" column that feels like a companion piece to the one I've cited a bunch on here about music-making-as-reblogging, Richardson outlines his goal or process with writing, and the conundrum which proved its impetus: 

I've always felt a bit off in my own world, which sometimes is a point of pride and other times feels like a kind of social failure. These days, for me, the greatest tension when writing about music is trying to bridge the gap between music as a private or a public experience. So part of me envied those who could join the conversation about Nicki Minaj and connect her music to the broader culture, because so much of the music I love and have interesting ideas about means almost nothing to the world as a whole. . . . And in the larger scheme of things, Alog [a band Richardson has had difficulty connecting with other people about] don't matter. At all. Unlike Nicki Minaj, if their music didn't exist, the world would be virtually no different. So when writing about Alog, I have no choice but to write about how this music might work for a single person (me), and how these abstract sounds might enrich a single life (mine). That's where the meaning is found.

While those final sentences might suggest a certain of solipsism, and while the opening could be misread as a kind of too-hip pretension, it's in establishing the connection between 1) the single listener/viewer/experiencer, 2) the moment in which he/she encounters the music/video/experience under discussion, and 3) the response to that music/video/experience as pre-conditioned by 1 and 2 that Richardson's writing (mostly) escapes those traps.

In the first piece on Lynch I linked to, for example, the moment in question, what you might call the point, is his experience of being in Yellowstone with his wife and:

laying in the tent. I felt like I could hear so much going on outside. Things rustling, sticks breaking. It was pitch black out and you couldn't see a thing. And I had a strong sensation of fear and dread. And I think it was partly because I was afraid of the responsibility that came with being in a relationship. If something happened and we were confronted by something dangerous, I was going to be the one to deal with it, primarily.

Of course, Richardson doesn't leave it at this point. There's been a perfectly good set-up for this moment already given--a series of killings in the park, an encounter with another hiker giving off strange vibes--but Richardson goes back to why at that moment he might be feeling fear and dread, why this responsibility suddenly and in that moment feels like such a terrible burden. And it's in that tracing back that he works in how Lynch on Lynch and Eraserhead fit into this psychic moment, how those works come to both explain and bear some of these emotions. I think it's an elegant move, as it doesn't impute an overly simplistic causal relationship between object and viewer/listener. That is, it doesn't limit the object to simply an explanation of the viewer/listener's experience of the object, but it does illuminate how certain aspects of the viewer/listener's experience activate (for lack of a better verb) parts of/meanings in the object. At the same time, the object retains a separate existence and can effect the viewer/listener because it is distinct from him/her. It's a tough balancing act. Going too far either way usually means bad writing.

The second piece, the one about The Elephant Man, does a good job of illustrating the separateness of the object from the viewer/listener. All of the significant details in the story are about Richardson, about the personal context of elephantiasis and John Merrick for him. Lynch's film is a spectre, a force that crystallizes all of those moments in Richardson without ever really being there. In fact, the closing paragraph which addresses the film most directly--though it is quite interesting and nicely pensive and wistful without being grasping--isn't even necessary for the piece to work. The way that bits of culture become ambient objects that structure and reflect our inner worlds has already been illustrated by the image of a ten-year-old boy listening to radio because he's too scared to turn on the TV, the device that brought something he'd already been afraid of to a fever pitch.