"This is why the electronic human lives faster and faster. He is forced to see everything and to hear everything.” 

—Bernard Parmegiani, 1973

I have been reading Olaf Stapledon - Starmaker, having read First and Last Men a year or two ago. He has an amazing imagination for 'worlds' - a Spengler-derived (I suspect) sense of civilisations that rise and fall, 'races' that come and go. First and Last Men was like a million-year history of Earth, and the many forms of human being and human society that develop, including a completely aerial stage of bird-men.  

With Starmaker the same impetus has taken his imagination into the far reaches of space, life-supporting planets in distant galaxies. But so far I would have say the worlds he imagines are rather anthropocentric -  they all have things like class, industrial revolution, racism, property, sex, religion etc. There's one where a piscine civilisation develops where the creatures evolve into boat-beings, with sails and rudders etc. Yet they still have factories and rich and poor. 

If they're not anthropocentic, they are Earthcentric - so there's yet another alien race where consciousness develops across flocks of birds, each bird is like a neuron in a sort of mind, connected by magnetic waves of information. So that is just starlings and their murmurations projected into some alien solar system. 

It's a weird combo of very imaginative yet also trapped within the conceptions and frameworks of our world. The classic fault-line of science fiction maybe - and showing how impossibly hard it is to conceive of the utterly otherly. Lem's Solaris and Fiasco come closest. 

Stapledon was left-wing and had political involvements, as did H.G. Wells another figure I have recently become fascinated by. In large part it's because of the insane, awe-inspiring amount of work these early 20th Century authors did - book after book, fiction and non-fiction,,, an endless stream of critical essays and reviews, often they had political involvements in various reform movements, did lectures and radio programs...  They were probably tremendous letter writers as well, giving the epistolary norms of the time.  

J.B. Priestley is another one. A book a year was the average rate. I guess they didn't have the Internet or TV to distract , and if they were married, they weren't exactly doing any domestic stuff or helping raise the kids. Still it's pretty extraordinary, I always imagine them rising at 7-am and cranking out 2000 words before lunch - a big chunk of the latest book, a review for The Listener. Then bunking off to go down the pub, walk the dog, or read. Pipe smoking all the while. 

 

(via Sean Albiez)

Age changes your perspective on everything, not just music. It would take a small book or long essay at least to discuss all that, but let’s say that some of the urgency and obsessive fixation inevitably fades away. You tend to have a better sense of proportion about things. When I wrote my early stuff, my life was empty in lots of ways. I was involved in relationships at various points, but the writing and the music took precedence. Nowadays my life is full – I’m a couple of decades into a marriage, I have two children. I don’t have the huge space of time or of emotional energy that I used to fill up with music-obsession. When you are young, music plays a major role in identity formation but as you got older, your identity is (hopefully) formed. You’re not looking to music to explain yourself to yourself, or be a savior, or the primary source of excitement and solace in your existence. Music remains my passion but it competes with other passions much more than it did when I was 22 and starting out as a music critic.

I also know a lot more about the history of music and have heard so much more, so things become more contextualized and perhaps I have sense of how cycles repeat in rock culture. By the age of 49 you’ve seen so many hype cycles kick off and then exhaust themselves. You are also less easily impressed. But that’s good I think - "SR, 2011

"Distinctive voices in rock are trained through years of many things: frustration, fear, loneliness, anger, insecurity, arrogance, narcissism, or just sheer perseverance – anything but a teacher."

- Chrissie Hynde

for "cant look you in the voice" - casual genius!

i wonder if this was the really the case (ie that she had the piles and piles of shit pages) or if it was actually that she in fact written almost nothing at all, barely started, and this was her clever way of avoiding "my grandma has died" or other go-to failsafe unanswerable excuse (that risked the possibility of being revealed to be a lie later on) 

 

 “Nothing dates the past like its impressions of the future” – Philip French, talking about Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 1990

 "The thing I find with aging is the double thing where on the one hand you feel like “ooh dear time is rushing ahead fast” but you find yourself wasting even more time than ever: the awareness of time running out doesn’t unfortunately lend any urgency to the everyday. Often I can’t think of anything to do – which is bizarre given the number of unread books, unlistened or not deeply enough listened music, films, etc etc piled up. My list of things to “check out finally for the first time” keeps getting bigger."

- SR