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Post by jamessmith on May 18, 2008 9:36:57 GMT
Phil,
THE WIRE interview mentioned you had done a doctorate.
Where may i obtain a copy of this, please?
Thank you.
James Smith
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Post by Joe Chip on Feb 17, 2010 1:47:23 GMT
As my missus is deep into postgraduate inter-library-lending territory currently she was able to get me a copy. Only got through the intro so far but it's very well-written, clear and readable by academic standards. My eyes only glazed over during the quotes from Derrida and Baudrillard.
Raised eyebrows - (i) Criticism of 'Apocalypse Culture' contributors as 'anti-liberalist, anti-humanist or even worse' in conjunction w/ presence of Sotos in the acknowledgements section - a private joke over the heads of the supervisors maybe? (ii) Citation of a late '80s Springsteen number, fucks sake.
Academia is a strange world. I prefer the blog pics of Alyssa B all in all. I also have a copy of the Smell & Quim mainman's truly bizarre but acccepted MA piece about John Carpenter's 'They Live'.
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Post by Joe Chip on Feb 25, 2010 14:56:42 GMT
Well, I read the whole of this. It's a pretty standard and dry piece of academic writing but interesting because of who wrote it, and my familiarity with the subject matter.
There's an unequivocal celebration of the redemptive possibilities of punk at the end of the introduction, very much following the leads of Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces. There are three exhaustive (and exhausting) chapters covering Burroughs' entire oeuvre with a great and unexpected diversion into Dworkin's early sex-positive utopian fantasies as compared to WSB's Wild Boys scene. Two chapters on Ballard's experimental texts, with particular focus on The Atrocity Exhibition. Some fresh and sharp insights here and unafraid to be critical of Ballard's failings. The diversion here is some hilarious stuff on Jake and Dinos Chapman. It really takes off in the final chapter on Gravity's Rainbow which focuses almost exclusively on the figure of Tyrone Slothrop as exemplar of 'creative paranoia' or counterforce (the self-defeating paranoia of conspiracy theory is condemned throughout) - this end section really does provide some further clues into the motivations and methodologies behind Philip Best's own art. In one fairly startling and florid footnote he states that time and space were essentially altered on July 16, 1945 (the Trinity test) but that committed artists and political activists can somehow re-start time. Which ties in with his statement in Zero Tolerance quite recently 'Art's not a fucking mirror' - the corollary, with acknowledgement to Brecht, is that it should be a fucking hammer - to reshape, not reflect.
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