bibliostructures

“I look at the essence of a song,” muses Holly Cole. “If it’s a great lyric I often love to slow it down, explore it, dissect it, deconstruct it and look at it in an entirely different way. In the process it often becomes more evocative. That’s a big part of my art form. That’s a huge part of what I do.”

Holly Cole

Cole conceived of the arrangements [on her new self-titled album] with pianist/accordionist Gil Goldstein (Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker), and bassist/producer Greg Cohen hand-picked the musicians based on their strength as both ensemble players and soloists, as well as for their possession of an individual sound. Their contributions enabled Cole to sing with an often understated quality and more subtlety than ever before. As well, returning to jazz, with its emphasis on spontaneous interpretation and complex communication between musicians, helped Cole emphasize the emotional intricacy and irony in her material.

“What you hear on the record,” she says, “is the moment in which the light bulb turns on for everybody — about the arrangement, about the song itself, about the people we’re playing with, about themselves. When you have musicians that are really good, that moment decays really quickly; they’re cleaning things up and going, ‘Let’s make it perfect.’ I love the fact that on so much of [the album], you can hear people discover things.”…

Cole’s love of mystery informs her album’s whole aesthetic. Usually a self-titled album is a statement of artistic intent, but she claims her new release’s lack of a descriptive title is more about not making a statement. The cover, in which she is mostly shrouded in darkness (only part of her face and her bare calves and feet revealed), is like a photograph the Surrealist Man Ray might have composed in the 1920s.

“You’re just given little tidbits of things,” she says, “my name, and my legs and my head, and you say to yourself, ‘Where is she? Is it night? Is it day? Is she alone? Is she in bed? Is she naked?’ There’s a bunch of suggestions about what’s going on, and loads of empty black space for your mind to go where you want it to be. Less is more, most of the time. It means that people are able to process what you’re singing or saying, to find it for themselves.”

Mike Doherty. National Post, Canada. March 13, 2007

The huge surprise for me in publishing my writing online has been how well it’s suited my tendency towards stillness and reflection. I had a few panicky preconceptions about the need to keep throwing new stories into the mouth of a hungry blog, and wondering if the short, snappy, snarly writing that was increasingly being requested of me in newspaper articles (a tone I can’t master) would also be required online. I’m grateful, and astonished, that it’s the polished, considered, lengthy stories that are the most popular. One of them is almost ten years in the writing (the Nick Cave project, suggested by him when I was living in Los Angeles and starting my bookbinding business and mentioned to him that I saw parallels in the symbols in his songs and those Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers discuss in The Power of Myth) and the other almost four years old, considering the new way of life and social rituals, based around food, that are being adapted to cope with the Australian drought as an eternal state, through a close reading of the poetic and practical books by biodynamic farmer, Patrice Newell, and the philosophies of the catering company, food&desire.

I’m less earnest than I used to be about trying to define what makes writing different on the screen or the page, but the need for multiple screens for electronic books is more and more important. There’s something about knowing the density and weight of a story that can’t be conveyed on a single screen: I suppose we all design the tools we long to use ourselves, but the outer limit of my stories is about 7,000 words, or about 30 pages of a regular novel or non-fiction book. Being able to flip backwards and forwards through about twenty pages of text at a time while reading is an important part of the reading process for me (a few Plastic Logic flexible electronic readers stapled together). I don’t read a lot of fiction (Michael Ondaatje, Haruki Murakami and Amit Chaudhuri are the exceptions) and the densely thoughtful spiritual studies by Pankaj Mishra, Karen Armstrong, and Elaine Pagels are my preferred reading. But I read a bushel of newspapers a day (online) the New York Times and Calcutta Telegraph are my staples, Worldchanging.com, and a number of blogs — Dayna Bateman’s Detritus is my favourite — and I want to be able to see more than one page, or one article at a time, no matter what I’m reading.

My writing is really an elaborate frame-work for the quotes I’m bringing in from other writers and the people I’m writing about. I rarely do my own interviews any more, and those are mostly conducted through e-mail. I like considered thoughts, and always give my interviewees time to reflect upon and polish their words: my stories tend towards the symbolic, there’s nothing to be gained by snagging the unvarnished first thought that pops into their heads. My newspaper editors began to despair of the lack of the direct quote in exactly the same proportion that I began to become excited about the indirect quote.

The Nick Cave project which is a curated (to use the fashionable term) conversation between several people who have a great deal to say about the context for the symbols in Nick’s songs and how they exist in the world, is the direction my large-scale projects are headed. I have no desire to do my own interviews. I’m always a few steps behind Nick (the charm and value of his songs to me are that they’re waiting for me when I arrive somewhere: Pankaj Mishra is the writer I want to be, but Nick’s words are the ones my heart agrees with.) Whenever I hear one of Nick’s new albums I imagine being at a restaurant and overhearing an intelligent and impassioned conversation about it from the next table: Elaine Pagels applying the Gospel of Thomas to Nick’s records, Jack Miles talking about Christ as a figure in literature, Pankaj Mishra talking about compassion and the joy that comes from sadness, and James Surowiecki talking about the wisdom of crowds (how the value in Nick’s symbols is how they’re compounded and used by people without needing experts and critics to tell them how to use them).

A discussion over dinner is something I’ll be putting together. The quality of people being relaxed while they’re sharing stories important, the nourishment of body and soul, the connection with philosophers gathering in cafes. I’m aiming for close microphones that cut out background noise so that the conversations can happen in the real world, not a studio or artificially quiet place. My favourite radio programmes with a long interview format all have that intimate quality though, even though they’re recorded in studios.

Quite unconsciously I’ve been compiling a collection of transcripts of great conversations:

Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said talking about home and music.

Michael Ondaatje and the film editor, Walter Murch.

Cameron Crowe and the film director, Billy Wilder.

Jean Claude Carierre, the screenwriter for Peter Brook’s Mahabarata, and the Dalai Lama.

The chef, Justin North, and the farmers and producers who supply the raw materials to his restaurant, Becasse.

and the enduring work, the book I refer to more often and above all others, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth.

What’s as important as the content, or the form of the book, and the number of screens, and whether or not the words are still on a sheet of paper or sparkling on a screen is the layout. The writing needs to spread out to be on left and right pages, the quotes need to be indented or footnoted somehow, one needs to be able to sink into a text, to have it displayed panoramically, like a landscape, something calm to consider slowly, something in stereo not mono. I don’t know exactly what this kind of book will look like, but when I gain the next round of financing for the Nick Cave project I’m going to bring in the designer Steven R. Gilmore. When I think of a dense layering of information and making it beautiful and resonant, without untangling it or diluting its complexity, it’s Steven’s work I think of.

Steven is a painter and photographer as well as a graphic designer and works with still and moving media, and by painstaking hand processes and with the sharpest digital tools. I admire his work in the way that I admire Holly Cole’s approach to songs written by other composers, he also finds the sadness and darkness in the works he’s given to interpret, and they become sweet and transcendent somehow, against expectations.