“Shame will save the world” – often translated as “Shame, the feeling that will save mankind” – is what the character of Kris Kelvin utters near the end of Solaris, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Can shame save the world?
For Dostoevsky, it was beauty that would perform that miracle. However, as a Greek blogger has said, beauty will save those who can see it. I tend to agree with this variation much more readily.
In any case, there is a point in selecting shame as the better candidate. I realized it going through a list of freelance jobs with ridiculously underpaid remuneration – think of $5 to produce 1500 words of text. Reading this I said out loud: “I would be embarrassed to offer that”.
And that’s when I realized the role of shame in saving the world.
Our societies are large, faceless, cold… There is no time for shame when there’s money to be made.(more…)
Certain art forms are easier to “misunderstand” than others. That is, it’s easier for any kind of authorial intention to become something entirely different in the eyes (or ears) of the audience at a social level. Music and poetry are particularly susceptible to this, because of their abstractness. Misunderstanding a song is indeed hilariously likely, as today’s story should indicate.
Indeed, the story I have to share with you today is a marvelous example of a piece of art that escapes the confines – and control – of an entire society with hilarious consequences.
Song lyrics, if they are written competently, are not straightforward. They are highly symbolic and thus easily “misunderstood”. I’d say that misunderstanding a song is a key factor of its artistic capabilities (more…)
“The meaning of novels: What’s so novel about a novel”. If you think the title is a bit insane, that’s what you get when you make a post out of a discussion between me and Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. We talk about novels, language, and whatever else comes to mind. Igor is also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.
Chris: This convo kind of started with my suggesting “No news is good news, I suppose”, which you expertly picked up.
Igor: No news is neither good nor bad, because there is no news to be valued or assessed. Yet, a certain literary background allows you to use this sentence the way you did. In a sense, it is a paradox. But it is only a paradox insofar as that paradox is the clearest and most direct way of saying what is condensed in the sentence. But how so? As I always say, but few people listen to me: Logic concerns only a very limited subset of human languages. Everything that really matters to say, that is, everything that is really interesting in the events of language lies beyond the limits of logic.
To jump to a more interesting part of the reasoning: This means that literature carries (with)in itself – encodes, someone will (wrongly) say – a knowledge (of a generative kind). But why all this? The strongest empirical (from the marketplace) evidence of what I am saying is in the growing trend of publishing houses adding “a novel” to the front cover of fiction books!
Usually I would’ve inserted here a stock photo relevant to the topic, the meaning of novels. But one meaning of a novel could be this: Create your own meaning. So, take this photo and create your own meaning on how it’s related to the “meaning of novels”.(more…)
