Re: [microsound] Re:ambient books

[Bill Jarboe <billjarboe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 11/12/02 11:42 AM, The pHarmanaut at pharmanaut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Greetings all.
> 
> 
>> Marcel Proust; '`A la Recherche du temps Perdu'.
> 
> I think that it's pretty clear that we're a fairly well-read bunch in
> diverse areas. As well as dropping author/title suggestions, I'd like to ask
> that we carry on this conversation about how a literary form might function
> in an ambient fashion. I think that it could illuminate the impulse toward
> creating ambient objects of any sort, musical, literary or otherwise. I
> think that within an "ambient literature" there has to be something more to
> the work than an interior focus on atmospherics, a surrendering of what some
> here have positioned as conventionally emphasized features such as plot,
> character and so on.
> 
> Can a literary object tint an objective environment? I'm not sure that it
> can except in two ways: one, as mentioned before, the work functions
> individually in a psychoactive fashion to alter the perceptive faculties of
> the user/reader; two, the work functions collectively by being performed,
> that is, read aloud.
> 

  One reason the Proust 'book' has such a profound effect is that if one
reads the entire work one is a different person at the end of the reading.
it also has the effect of acting upon the reader in a way to enable the
reader to observe the world differently for an extended time period ( one or
two years). The narrator really doesn't 'do' much of anything with his life
in search of a vocation, it's the perception of the world which changes.

  There is also the matter of the english translation which some critics
claimed was better that the original.

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