Sunday 24 June 2007
by wilhelm kempff
This sonata represents a most personal confession, so it is no wonder that Beethoven wished to keep it for himself and did not dedicate it to anyone. Moderato cantabile molto espressivo: An intimate light shines out of the two unworldly themes, which are linked by rising and falling arpeggios. In the development the principal theme makes its way through various keys and is sometimes darkened, to radiate light again at the beginning of the recapituation. Beethoven seems to be remembering the days when he could live in full possession of all his senses. The robust theme is based on an old popular song. In the recitative (Adagio, ma non troppo) and the concluding Arioso dolente the piano is called upon to act as the medium for one of the most moving of human utterances. Fuga (Allegro, ma non troppo): Beethoven gives the fugue a new, psychological significance, seeking to free himself from personal grief through this higher discipline. Once again we hear the music of the Arioso, 'wearily lamenting'. Thereupon the fugal theme appears inverted and mystically transfigured in a bright G major. Its original form is taken up powerfully in the bass and leads to a triumphant conclusion.
Wednesday 6 June 2007
以前
夢留在溫暖裡面，車刮過黑色的柏油路面。
剩一口不抽的煙，瀰漫著白色慵懶的疲倦。
如果要再見可以更直接些。太小心拿捏不是虛偽了點？都知道的，別自我欺騙。
有什麼終於不見，
醒來後熟悉的冰冷世界。
像骨刺的舊天線，卡住今天接收不了明天。
天亮之前好好對看一眼
你曾是我最想落腳的終點
不過原來已經是很久之前
那是之前走不出的圓圈，總是對你的好放大了一點
不過我比想像的乾脆。
也許我們都愛濫用著諒解，也許我們總覺得被人虧欠，交換了狂喜也交換亢奮之後那些厭倦。
也許愛就是會濫用著諒解，也許我們總覺得不被了解，其實我討厭快樂能變成邪惡，太多的自憐。
不過我比想像的堅決。
不過，如果...
剩一口不抽的煙，瀰漫著白色慵懶的疲倦。
如果要再見可以更直接些。太小心拿捏不是虛偽了點？都知道的，別自我欺騙。
有什麼終於不見，
醒來後熟悉的冰冷世界。
像骨刺的舊天線，卡住今天接收不了明天。
天亮之前好好對看一眼
你曾是我最想落腳的終點
不過原來已經是很久之前
那是之前走不出的圓圈，總是對你的好放大了一點
不過我比想像的乾脆。
也許我們都愛濫用著諒解，也許我們總覺得被人虧欠，交換了狂喜也交換亢奮之後那些厭倦。
也許愛就是會濫用著諒解，也許我們總覺得不被了解，其實我討厭快樂能變成邪惡，太多的自憐。
不過我比想像的堅決。
不過，如果...
Saturday 11 November 2006
10,000 light years from home
John Clute is impressed by M John Harrison's Nova Swing, a science fiction tale that expands the possibilities of perception
John Clute
Saturday November 11, 2006
Guardian
Nova Swing
by M John Harrison
304pp, Gollancz, £17.99
On the opening page of M John Harrison's new novel, a man named Vic Serotonin, who has a history of mood swings, sits in a bar in the centre of Saudade, a city 10,000 light years from home. It is a town whose inhabitants are unutterably distant from their past lives, lives which they still hope against hope they can somehow recover. The Portuguese term saudade encompasses romantic nostalgia and a dreamlike aspiration that that which is lost may be found again: the difference between it and desideratum or Sehnsucht lies precisely in that poignant retention of hope. The difference between Nova Swing and much recent British science fiction - including a lot of Harrison's own earlier work - is similar. There may not be much wiggle room left in Nova Swing for the human species at the end of its psychic tether, but there's enough to go on with.
Technically, Nova Swing is a sequel to 2002's superb Light, which also bootstraps itself out of the lockjaw entropy of our given world into a science fiction dream of possible action; but Light is an epiphany, and it only burns once. It focuses on a light-years distant ontological disturbance in time/space called the Tefahuchi Tract, and as the book closes, its various protagonists slingshot themselves into the heart of the unknown. Nova Swing does not go there, for the Tract is exactly beyond words. It is a blackish comedy, set in the aftermath of all that light, in what one might call the mundane world of the future - a world in which human beings are as they have always been.
Saudade is built on a planet overshadowed by the Tract, an aspect of which has fallen to ground within the city, radiating chaos through its permeable membrane. But it is not as simple as an invasion. What is officially known as an "event" is in fact a crosshatching of realities (the waves of black and white cats that at dawn and dusk flood the interstices between worlds are vividly reminiscent of Escher's drawings of black and white birds swapping colours as they change worlds). For the exiled humans of Saudade, the taste of Tefahuchi in their midst is soul catnip. But it is more than that. The event plays them; among all the things we cannot understand, one thing we do know: the event is a centre-of-gravity of story greater than any human life-story can withstand, and also a deeply unhuman disrupter of story. Saudade, which has become the permeable membrane at its heart, is a tango of stories which tells its cast; but dices them, reassembles them as patchwork.
It is almost impossible to convey a message like this - that we are utterances, not makers - without melodrama; but Harrison, quite astonishingly, succeeds. The inhabitants of Saudade, each of them grotesquely garbed in lifestyles they cannot seem to understand are borrowed or imposed, are given to us utterly without condescension. Serotonin, his lovers and his employers occupy a mean-street noir idiom and world, one familiar to any 21st-century reader nostalgic for 20th-century techniques for coping with life; and what we feel for them, as their skins burn off and other stories lace their bewildered selves, is a kind of love.
The story itself is not complicated. A bunch of noir guys and their women are engulfed, some permanently, by one woman's unslakeable need to enter the actual event site. There are moments of high science fiction action, beautifully sustained by Harrison through the side of his mouth; and when we gain access to the interior of the site, we begin to get the point of Harrison's sometimes stiff style - a gnarly clarity of diction as much like "ordinary" science fiction writing as the language of Peter Carey's The Unusual Life of Tristram Smith resembles a travelogue - because that style is deeply devotional to the perceived world. The miracle a writer of the fantastic such as Harrison performs is to expand the possibilities of perception. In the end, the extravagances of Nova Swing are as real as anything we are ever told.
· John Clute is currently preparing a third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Orbit)
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006
John Clute
Saturday November 11, 2006
Guardian
Nova Swing
by M John Harrison
304pp, Gollancz, £17.99
On the opening page of M John Harrison's new novel, a man named Vic Serotonin, who has a history of mood swings, sits in a bar in the centre of Saudade, a city 10,000 light years from home. It is a town whose inhabitants are unutterably distant from their past lives, lives which they still hope against hope they can somehow recover. The Portuguese term saudade encompasses romantic nostalgia and a dreamlike aspiration that that which is lost may be found again: the difference between it and desideratum or Sehnsucht lies precisely in that poignant retention of hope. The difference between Nova Swing and much recent British science fiction - including a lot of Harrison's own earlier work - is similar. There may not be much wiggle room left in Nova Swing for the human species at the end of its psychic tether, but there's enough to go on with.
Technically, Nova Swing is a sequel to 2002's superb Light, which also bootstraps itself out of the lockjaw entropy of our given world into a science fiction dream of possible action; but Light is an epiphany, and it only burns once. It focuses on a light-years distant ontological disturbance in time/space called the Tefahuchi Tract, and as the book closes, its various protagonists slingshot themselves into the heart of the unknown. Nova Swing does not go there, for the Tract is exactly beyond words. It is a blackish comedy, set in the aftermath of all that light, in what one might call the mundane world of the future - a world in which human beings are as they have always been.
Saudade is built on a planet overshadowed by the Tract, an aspect of which has fallen to ground within the city, radiating chaos through its permeable membrane. But it is not as simple as an invasion. What is officially known as an "event" is in fact a crosshatching of realities (the waves of black and white cats that at dawn and dusk flood the interstices between worlds are vividly reminiscent of Escher's drawings of black and white birds swapping colours as they change worlds). For the exiled humans of Saudade, the taste of Tefahuchi in their midst is soul catnip. But it is more than that. The event plays them; among all the things we cannot understand, one thing we do know: the event is a centre-of-gravity of story greater than any human life-story can withstand, and also a deeply unhuman disrupter of story. Saudade, which has become the permeable membrane at its heart, is a tango of stories which tells its cast; but dices them, reassembles them as patchwork.
It is almost impossible to convey a message like this - that we are utterances, not makers - without melodrama; but Harrison, quite astonishingly, succeeds. The inhabitants of Saudade, each of them grotesquely garbed in lifestyles they cannot seem to understand are borrowed or imposed, are given to us utterly without condescension. Serotonin, his lovers and his employers occupy a mean-street noir idiom and world, one familiar to any 21st-century reader nostalgic for 20th-century techniques for coping with life; and what we feel for them, as their skins burn off and other stories lace their bewildered selves, is a kind of love.
The story itself is not complicated. A bunch of noir guys and their women are engulfed, some permanently, by one woman's unslakeable need to enter the actual event site. There are moments of high science fiction action, beautifully sustained by Harrison through the side of his mouth; and when we gain access to the interior of the site, we begin to get the point of Harrison's sometimes stiff style - a gnarly clarity of diction as much like "ordinary" science fiction writing as the language of Peter Carey's The Unusual Life of Tristram Smith resembles a travelogue - because that style is deeply devotional to the perceived world. The miracle a writer of the fantastic such as Harrison performs is to expand the possibilities of perception. In the end, the extravagances of Nova Swing are as real as anything we are ever told.
· John Clute is currently preparing a third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Orbit)
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006
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