3 an assault on the sun

MP3:AN ASSAULT ON THE SUN

Of the three tracks I've put up so far, this is the most musical. As opposed to merely focusing on sound. A real pensive thing composed merely on sine samples and coming together in less than a couple hours.

Given a desire to select and manipulate words, it generally seems preferable to avoid things written by other people and write about life itself. The significance of what you relate stands or falls regardless of the quality of the efforts of some other author. As well, there is a sort of imperative presence of mind that arises with you are addressing your own personal life and fate. This frequently disappears when we take on the pretense of appraising the lives and ideas of famous people. The opposing alternative seems to be: to attempt and portray moments of real life as I have personally experienced them; settings, characters, and situations that would have no representation save an account that I could provide...descriptions of successes and failures that have no discernible bearing upon anything else in the world other than my own humble fate and those of a few vague acquaintances. The difficulties that prevent this alternative are considerable. The immediate obstacle is "the routine": irrelevance, triviality, the complete lack of imagination that accompanies things already done before they are started: the majority of real life..."the routine" is almost the entire substance of every event that I am personally witness to. (While my own personal mediocrity is almost certainly what is to blame for this, when I consider all the people I've met, I'd have to say that I believe this to be the situation for the large percentage of them) Attempting to construct something from the tedious continuum of real life is not an insurmountable task; certain instrumental moments and encounters could be selected and portrayed. This strategy has been recommended before: "Novels will give way, by and by to diaries or autobiographies- captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly."

For one thing, the narrative that resulted would be so artificial that it would border on falsehood. The bulk of real life is not the interesting moments. If I were to write an account which included them and rejected all else, the persona that emerged...someone who was engaged, conflicted, instrumental, involved...this would bear a very tenuous relationship to the real person whose concentration serves as a direction for these remarks.

For another, the character of the representation is far more interesting than the events themselves. Or any events for that matter. For what stories have not already been told? An analogy with photography makes the point easier to see. New ways of altering images are almost always far more interesting than the appearance of a subject or the event of a photograph. I take a picture of a street or a shopping mall or a crowd and they become, effectively, a picture of nothing...because people see them everyday and they fade into a background which is nothing. To make the picture interesting, I try to come up with novel ways of adjusting the hue...the saturation...the contrast...The picture only starts to become interesting when novelties in the form become the figure itself, the content, the nothingness of everyday life, disappears into the ground.

For another, (from Fitzgerald): "He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea captain and thinks he's an original character. The truth is that he sees the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Mr. X created, or who-ever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how to set this sea captain on paper."