About SMiLE

Ian Penman reviews a new Brian Wilson biography and raises the vexed question of whether the Beach Boys’ Quixotic project known first as Dumb Angel, then SMiLE, should ever have seen the light of day: 

For some fans it should have remained a glorious dream, better left unrealised. A labyrinth without a centre. The Arcades Project of pop.

Penman’s writing in the London Review of Books so maybe he doesn’t feel it necessary to explain a reference to Walter Benjamin, because the readership would get it (or feel too embarrassed to admit they didn’t get it). That said, given his previous form, I suspect he’d have done the same thing when he was writing for the NME.

About a dissertation

I finished my MA course last year, and submitted my dissertation in September. It’s been prodded and poked and evaluated and checked for plagiarism and moral turpitude and probably verrucas, but I was waiting until I’d officially graduated to spread the picture on a wider screen. The current pandemic, of which you may have heard, has rather put paid to that, so sod it, here it is.



There are a couple of typos in there, and a few things I wish I’d expressed a little more cogently, but there we are. It’s about 15,000 words, so you should be able to get through it more quickly than you did The Irishman. Take care now.

About Walter Benjamin (yet again)

Obviously, it’s easy to trawl through the work of writers from decades past and find that they’ve (presumably accidentally) had the core idea for some phenomenon that only came into being in our own time. Going back over The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, though, I realise Benjamin leaves the competition standing. Writing in 1936, he comes up with social media...

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers — at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. 

And then reality TV...

In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves — and primarily in their own work process. 

...in the space of a couple of paragraphs. Nice work, Walt.

PS: Edward Ward asks, Where’s Walter?

About masters

An extraordinary story by Jody Rosen in the New York Times, about a fire at the Universal Studios in Hollywood in 2008 that destroyed the masters of sound recordings by, among many others, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Bo Diddley, the Andrews Sisters, Etta James, Ray Charles, Burt Bacharach, Captain Beefheart, Al Green, Iggy Pop, Nirvana... essentially, a massive chunk of 20th-century American music ceased to exist in matter of minutes. I’m not sure what’s more astonishing, that such a calamity was allowed to occur, or that its full extent is only now being revealed, more than a decade on. 

But does it matter that much? I mean, it’s not as if the music is entirely lost, is it? Well, some of it is: it turns out that some of the material lost to the flames had never seen a commercial release, had never made it off the tapes in the first place. There’s a bigger point, though, as Rosen argues:

But the case for masters extends beyond arguments about bit depth and frequency ranges audible only to dogs. It enters the realms of aesthetics and phenomenology. Simply put, the master of a recording is that recording; it is the thing itself. The master contains the record’s details in their purest form: the grain of a singer’s voice, the timbres of instruments, the ambience of the studio. It holds the ineffable essence that can only truly be apprehended when you encounter a work of art up-close and unmediated, or as up-close and unmediated as the peculiar medium of recorded sound permits. “You don’t have to be Walter Benjamin to understand that there’s a big difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting,” [producer Andy] Zax said in his conference speech. “It’s exactly the same with sound recordings.” 

About Benjamin (again)

More classroom antics. We’ve been nosing around the lower reaches of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a massive, unfinished tome that’s superficially about Paris in the 19th century but manages to pull in Marxism, surrealism, postmodernism, flânerie and more; I’m tracing lines from here to Borges, Perec and more. It’s delightful and frustrating in equal parts that what we have left is a vast selection of fragments, but it does occasionally give a hint of the average writer’s working method. For example:

Play on words with “-rama” (on the model of “diorama”) in Balzac at the beginning of Pere Goriot.

which is essentially a placeholder, a comedian’s [INSERT JOKE HERE]. Another particularly appealed to me with my restaurant reviewer’s hat on, although this is one I’m almost glad he didn’t finish:

There is, to speak once more of restaurants, a nearly infallible criterion for determining their rank. This is not, as one might readily assume, their price range. We find this unexpected criterion in the color of the sound that greets us when [broken off]

About criticism

Walter Benjamin died in 1940, so I guess we should excuse his tendency to gender-specific pronouns:

Regarding the terrible misconception that the quality indispensable to the true critic is “his own opinion”: it is quite meaningless to learn the opinion of someone about something when you do not even know who he is. The more important the critic, the more he will avoid baldly asserting his own opinion. And the more his insights will absorb his opinions. Instead of giving his own opinion, a great critic enables others to form their opinion on the basis of his critical analysis.