Spurious

Canada

W. thinks constantly of Canada. It's his new line of flight, he admits, to get to Canada. Since I haven't had any lines of flight for a while, it's his turn, he says, and getting to Canada, with its pristine blue lakes and bear-filled wilderness is his line of flight. Of course, W. is Canadian, and his Canada is not a fantasy. It's based on his own childhood by the great blue lakes and on the edge of the wilderness, and alongside the open-hearted Canadians.

We had a big house, he remembers, and went swimming every day. We were happier then. Sometimes he shows me pictures: a happy family, by a big house, with pine trees behind, and a big blue lake to swim in. And who are those people, I ask him? Canadians, says W., open-hearted Canadians.

Moving back to England was the disaster, says W. Wolverhampton of all places! England's bad enough, but Wolverhampton! He shows me pictures of himself in school uniform. It had all gone wrong by then, says W., can't you see it in my eyes? I can see it. Ever since then, says W., he's dreamt of getting back to Canada.

It's not impossible, he says. His sister's made it. She's a Canadian now. Or perhaps it's impossible for him, he says, and for the likes of us. It would be impossible for you in particular, he tells me. The Canadians wouldn't put up with you for a moment. Canada! It's a big country, unlike England, says W. And cheap, too - he was there a couple of years ago on holiday, and was amazed. It's cheap, and the people are open-hearted. Not like the English, he says.

Feral children rap on his windows as we talk. What do they want?, I ask him. He's got no idea. Close the shutters!, he says, and we sit in darkness with our gin. Are there feral children in Canada?, I ask W. He thinks not. It has a good social security system, he says, and an egalitarian attitude. They pay well, too. Salaries are high. Canadians enjoy a high standard of living, with their blue, pure lakes and the great tracts of wilderness.

Would the cold bother him?, I ask W, who always moans he's cold. It's not wet cold like over here, says W. It's dry cold, completely different. It doesn't feel anything like as bad. And it's not as depressing. You don't get wave after wave of Westerlies coming in from the Atlantic. In England, we're battered by Westerlies, says W., but in Canada, the weather is as pure and simple as the lakes and the open-hearted people.

What about the bears - wouldn't they frighten him?, I ask W., who is not a brave man. They are ways of dealing with bears, W. assures me. The Canadians issue pamphlets on the matter. They probably keep things in the back of their cars to alarm them. Bear-frighening devices. Wouldn't he have to learn to drive in Canada?, I ask W. It's a big country after all, and there are miles of wilderness to negotiate. W. admits he might have to. He'd take lessons, he says. That would be part of his new life.

And what if he broke down?, I ask W. He'd have to learn some basic car maintenance, W. admits, for the Canadian wilderness. But he's practical, he says, and would pick it up quickly, not like me. You wouldn't last a minute in Canada, he says.

Inanity

I am an expert at inanity, everyone knows that. It's my great talent, says W., to be able to generate nonsense and to do so with others. Hours can pass, days, and there's still more inanity to be tapped. How is it possible?, asks W. How do you do it? Whenever he's in my company, says W., he longs for nothing other than to read Spinoza. Spinoza, he says, is your opposite. He longs for nothing else than to pore over Spinoza. All the answers are there he says.

Inanity - how do we do it?, W. wonders. For W. has a part in it too. W. is also an expert inanist. We ask each other questions, 'Would you call yourself a corruptible man?', or 'Do you consider yourself to be a man of emotion?' which permit of infinite permutations and infinitely stupid answers. W. is a great expert at question asking. When there's silence for a moment, W. is ready with a question. I admit it, I've learned from him the great art of arbitrary question asking.

W.'s questions often have a melancholic tinge. 'What do you consider your greatest failure?'; 'When you look back over your life, how do you excuse it?'; 'Why do you think things turned out so badly for you?'; 'Do you think you will ever come up with a single idea?'; 'What do you regret most about your life?': these are all classic W. questions, which begin with a presumption of a failure that is utter and complete.

'That's what draws us together', says W., 'our sense of having failed'. I always tell him that I lack such a sense, and that things have turned out quite well, considering. I tell him his love of failure is a nostalgia for success. 'In your heart, you measure yourself against success'. I tell him I recognise no such idols. 'We were doomed from the start, everyone's doomed ...'

We're on the North Devon coast, in Minehead, looking for cider. You'd think you could find it here, this is Somerset. A morning cider! Bright and glinting in our pint glasses! It's a bright, warm day and we are after nothing other than cider, Somerset cider, though there's none to be found. So we climb the hill instead, to enjoy the views. Up we go, our chatter filling the morning air.

We're on particularly good form. Chatter pours forth in joyous profusion. Have we ever been happier? Have we ever achieved such inanity? Secretly, we both know we've reached our high point. It must be the morning air, the brightness, the sunlight on the waves below. There's no cider in us, no alcohol, but it must be the air growing thinner as we climb. We feel purified. Light pours down upon us. We twitter like birds. We laugh and twitter.

How funny we are! But to none but ourselves. How inane! But who would appreciate it but us? At the summit of the hill, we can see the town spreading out on one side of us, and the sea on the other in the morning brightness. This is it, we've done it: it's our ascent into the thinnest, most rarefied of inanities. But who would know it but us? Who would appreciate us but us?

Rivers

W. and I are celebrants of rivers, and always feel the need to hail them. 'The mighty Tyne!', W. might say, and I might say 'the mighty Plym!' The sight of a river is always an occasion. So, of course, is the sea. 'It's the ozone', says W. 'it makes you feel good'.

It does, and the view of the sheet of the sea, just past Exeter. The whole sheet of the sea, viewed from the train, neat Plmouth Gin and ice in our plastic cups. 'This is happiness', says W. Of course, they'll have to reroute the trains soon. They're electrical and shortcircuit when the surf splashes over them. Sometimes the trains stop for hours, completely shortcircuited. 'It's the new trains', says W., 'they're useless'.

W. says he's felt ill nearly all his adult life. 'When was the last time you felt well?', I ask him. He can't remember. 'It's been years', he says suddenly. 'Years!' He used to go for great walks on the moors, he remembers. That's when he last felt healthy: on his great weekend walks, when he would set off with no end in particular in view. He'd just walk, for miles, across the moors.

There's nothing better, he says, than to climb up to the moors, and sea the blue strip of the sea in the distance. Are there really big cats up there, panthers and the like?, I ask him. He never saw any, he said. But his moor walks have long since finished. He lacks something, says W. There's something missing in him. Why doesn't he go on his great moor walks any more?, he muses, as we look out to sea.

It's important to hail rivers, we both agree, but just as important to hail the sea, although we do not do so by name. We do not, for instance, hail the sea south of Edinburgh as the North Sea, or the sea south of Exeter as the Atlantic ('is it the Atlantic?', I ask W.) A simple, 'the sea!' is enough. Just as when we see the edge of the moor on our train journeys in Devon, we say 'the moor!'

Ah, the moor! W. is feeling regretful again. He looks very young, I tell him, younger than me, even though he's several years older. His life is full of regret, he says, and gets out his Spinoza. He's going to read now, he tells me, and I'll have to entertain myself.

Transcendental Whining

By email, W. tells me I come across as too whiny in the W. posts. 'It's better when you make yourself talk, rather than just reacting to me. But of course I am a terrible nag'.

W. remembers that I spoke to him at length about free jazz, commenting on its relationship to free improvisation, and the distrust many Afro-American improvisers have felt towards the rhetoric of depersonalisation taken over from John Cage and post-Cageans. Jazz improvisation is often linked to the idea of telling your own story, of finding your voice, not depersonalisation, I'd said, though perhaps this is not so at odds with post-Cagean discourse on free improvisation as one might think. Perhaps the two could be thought together, I'd said, and tried at some length to outline how.

He'd enjoyed listening to me, W. says; he'd learnt something, and why didn't I write about that? I like to present myself as a victim, W. observes. It's one of my key traits. In fact, it is my key trait. I want to think of myself as a victim and then whine about it night and day.

Is W. a victim? No, not really, says W. He doesn't have the victim mentality that I've perfected. 'You love feeling like a victim. You like nothing better than to be persecuted'. - 'But you must admit, I've been a little persecuted!' - 'How?', says W., 'give me examples', and when I do, he says, 'you're no more persecuted than I am. You're not in the least persecuted'.

Why do I like to feel persecuted?, W. muses. It's because of my general hysteria. 'You're an hysteric', says W., 'ceaselessly whining', but he likes me because of this. 'There's something magnificent about your whining. Sometimes it reaches a magnificent purity. You attain whining itself, says W., 'the pure "to whine"'.

W. is a mystic, and I am a whiner, he says. It takes a mystic to discover what is eternal in my whining. 'It's magnificent', he says, 'go on, do some whining. Whine, fat boy. Tell your story'.

Last year, on the banks of the Dreisam river ('ah, the mighty Dreisam'), W. held forth at length on finding your own voice. He thinks he might have found his quite recently, he said. He's noticed quite a change in his writing.

'And what about you?', W. reflected. 'Your voice', he says to me, 'is like a transcendental whining'. It's amazing, he notes, just how much I whine, and how much I give myself to it. 'It absorbs everything you are', said W. In many ways, he admires it, said W. He thinks it's why he's drawn to me.

Small Men

W. and I are watching the new Scout Niblett video, the one where Will Oldham is dressed as a skeleton. 'She's from Nottingham', says W. proudly. Nottingham! Imagine that! Not so far from here! Will Oldham does a handstand in the video. I'm impressed, and say so. W. likes to watch me watching Will Oldham being physical. 'You're impressed by his physicality', he says, and he's right.

W. say him Will Oldham  a dance machine at ATP, where you have to put your feet onto these pads that light up in time to the music. 'He was fantastic', says W. The next year, he paid for me to do the same. 'You were useless. You're not a physical man. That's why you admire Will Oldham's physicality, isn't it?' I say it is. 'Of course, Will Oldham's a surfer', says W. 'He's surprisingly buff. But you're not buff, are you? Except for your arms. But they're just grotesquely big'.

W. remarks on how small Will Oldham is. 'He's tiny'. So is David Pajo, I say. 'Oh yes, he's small'. For his part, W. has always considered himself a small man. Once, our friend X. a nightclub bouncer, picked up W. and twirled him round over his head like a cheerleader's baton. W. didn't mind. He always feels safe with X., he says. X. makes him feel secure and safe. We both pause to think about X., whom we haven't seen for a while. Ah, X.!

Do make him feel safe?, I ask W. 'No', he says. 'Just thin'. W. says I'm, getting fatter. 'You're not going to last long', he says. 'You haven't got too many years left. Look at you. When you die, I'm going to be your literary executor. Delete, delete, delete that's what I'm going to do'.

The Hunger Artist

Kafka's hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art - crowds come to watch him in his cage. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to the live performances, there is the question of who is going to comprise the group (or whether, indeed, it will number more than one), the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of performance, with a run through of the set with participating musicians, all of whom have a considerable input) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the 'studio' albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on - even as there is a large element of improvisation in the performances.

But in another sense, there is no choice when it comes to the performance (and particularly in the studio recordings): at their heart, they have a man in extremity, a man who performs, I think, to give this extremity to song. In live performances, the Representative's face is blank - not a mask but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project nothing (what is feeling? what does he see of the audience? what is he thinking?) but also everything, for does not his blankness invite the wildest of speculation.

A blank face - but the gestures of a guitarist, a bassist, a pianist (whatever he is playing) are also present; we can watch the Representative turn to his fellow musicians, watching them; we can watch him shuffle and dip and crouch over his guitar. He is a physical player. But the face, half hidden by a fedora, is blank. Certainly we can watch the words come from his mouth - watch him lean into the microphone, drawling sometimes, stretching a word, but always wanting to be heard, always precise in his vocalising. A blank face - and no stage banter when a guitar string breaks, and he has to wait for three or four long minutes another guitar to be brought from behind stage. No 'thank you very much' for listeners who might have travelled halfway round the globe to see him.

What do the audience of Kafka's hunger artist watch? A man in extremity. A man who starves. What a feat! What endurance! And Jandek's audience? 'I come to bring you a bit of depression ...' Watching the live band settling into their groove, interacting but following the lead of the Representative's vocal, I wonder whether it is really extremity we see there, on the stage. In live performance, the lyrics change: they become more frank, more confessional; some (Manhattan Tuesday) permit of a simple, autobiographical interpretation. Is he a man in extremity or a controlled man, part of a controlled ensemble who somehow seeks to account for himself, to search for himself, and before an audience?

Often he will acknowledge that audience in his lyrics. 'I don't know why I'm here/ to sing in front of you'. But it is an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of what they will see. Why is he here? But it should be admitted, too, that we find another lovely kind of extremity in the speech-song of Glasgow Monday, The Cell - a wholly new style of vocalising in Jandek's oeuvre. A first - a breathy, tentative, suspended speech-song that seeks and searches over the piano - but for what? Some kind of resolution; a provisional answer to the questioning that is his speech-sung voice. And, too, that some performances revel in a muscular thrashing, in power, which has little to do with confession at all.

Perhaps at Jandek's heart is not always a man who starves. But then, with the solo recordings that follow the acapella period around the turn of the millennium, that starving man is there and he is all there is. A starving man - and who starves because what is good for us (romance and work, ordinary sociability) is what he cannot find a way to want. He falls short of what we take for granted; he searches for what we, his listeners, presume ourselves to have. He is a man in exile, a man in suspense. Life, for him, is some kind of mistake, some aberration. And yet he sings. He starves.

I do not mean to imply that, listening to Jandek we are like the spectators outselves Kafka's hunger artist's cage; I don't think we are the well-fed watchers for whom his starvation is an art we can admire, and for which can be exchanged the panther who takes his place when he eventually expires. I wonder whether we listen from a kind of starvation of our own - from that place in us where we are not in place - where the possibility of life, ordinary life, seems to wear itself away. For the hunger-artist, there is an audience of the hungry. How else could we bear what we heard? How could we want it?

Granted, there are those for whom the oeuvre of Jandek is a kind of stunt. Some, like Irwin Chusid, marvel at it - for all his derision (and Chusid is an articulate and funny man - he's hilariously derisive) - there is his wonder that there were ever Jandek recordings at all. Why would anyone want to do that?, he asks, over and again. The fact of their existence perturbs him, and he seems to admire what he takes to be a mad tenacity. This is one of the images of Jandek circulated in the media - of an infinitely perverse man, a curiosity, an outsider, a kind of beast.

For their part, Corwood do not admit to being perturbed. Letters from Chusid are met with friendly toleration. I think the early days were so difficult that Chusid's acknowledgement was already an encouragement sufficient to go on. We find a similar attitude in the filmakers of Jandek on Corwood who admit they were first lured to their subject by his reputation - the 'myth' of Jandek, and we a little disappointed, at first by the music. Doesn't Katy Vine, the journalist who tracked down Sterling Smith in his Houston home admit the same?

For those listeners, there was of course also the record sleeves which, after the live performances, we can be sure depict Smith himself, photographed at various ages and in range of situations, often making use of photograph-altering software. Here, too, we find a kind of blankness - the blank face of Six and Six, which matches so perfectly this hard, affect-less recording (tracks that find their way into an affectless state at the heart of great depressive moods; the still eye of the storm), is defiantly - who? The smiling man in a cardigan in front of a barn is the opposite of the singer/intoner of Worthless Recluse ... what speaks by way of the failure of this correlation?

Interpretation breaks down. It runs aground on the record sleeves, which will eventually stop picturing Smith at all. Smith becomes a sufi on two of them. He is outside Mansion House in London, on deserted streets, on another. Each time, with respect to the recordings themselves, there is something missing. Who isn't tempted to read and reread the covers in search for a clue (what is he carrying on the sleeve of Blue Corpse?)? Something missing - and that it is who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek; it is Smith himself; it is the absence in the space of Smith, who cannot find a way to live.

We should admit the recordings are varied; there is a ludic Jandek - a playful, hilarious one (think, for example, of 'Mother's Day Card', where two voices sing the message on the inside of such a card); a spooky one (the multiple voices of 'Om'); a meditative one ('I Sit Alone and Think About You'). for a long time, I think, there were no recordings at all - the acapella recordings seem to come after a break; the voice is deeper.

This becomes especially noticeable on the studio recordings that follow the great I Threw You Away - for my money, the greatest in Jandek's mighty oeuvre. The Humility of Pain, Khartoum, Raining Down Diamonds ... what is being pursued from album to album? My answer, very simple: starvation. The inability to eat, to find a thing to eat. And more intensely than ever; more focusedly than ever.

These recordings, I think, close themselves from Chusid and other, similar listeners - those who are looking for the stunt-Jandek, to confirm or disconfirm the Jandek-myth. How, when you had heard them - really heard them - from your own starvation, could you go out to look for the man who made them. They are forbidding. They push us back, I fancy, as they push Smith back too - doesn't he wonder at them? Isn't he amazed, too at what he has made? How not to feel a kind of holy seriousness around these recordings, which hold themselves, with respect to our listening, at their own distance?

I am always moved to read of the quiet reverentness that, for the most part greets Jandek performances (though it is always fun to read of those who call out, welcome to ... X, and for Smith himself to - briefly - smile). We know seriousness. We know a kind of sacred - a distance - that surrounds the recordings. I'm sure that Smith feels it too. Sure, that is, that they also push him back from what he has done. What must it be to live at that remove from himself? To honour the recordings that made themselves from singing and playing?

I think this is part of what it means to be a hunger-artist who reaches the hunger-listeners who open their ears inside us. I think it demands a paring away, a blankness. The studio recordings have reached moods more terrifying than anything I have heard. Moods of a desolation so absolute - of a despair so refined that ... they escape what I can say of them. How to greet them except by silence? There are few artists whose work I will simply put on and listen to. Few whose work has a drama sufficient to carry that listening, when a hungry man steps forward to listen in my place.

Jandek: hunger artist. Perhaps the distance of the recordings - their rarefaction, their daring - is the double of that which the artist feels towards the world, towards the ordinary possibility of living. He sings in extremity - is it not reasonable to suppose that he lives, too, in extremity? How can he bear what he bears? But he sings, plays and records. He issues LPs. And now, of course, he plays live, too. I think there must be great joy in this. Why not? Hasn't the hunger artist found something to eat?

The live performances seem different to what has gone before. There's less distance around them. And, in the performances, less extremity. Is this what has permitted a kind of autobiographical turn in their lyrics? Is it because the presence of other musicians make Jandek something other than a machine that quarries despair? I admit I listen to the live recordings (with the exception of The Cell) with different ears. Or rather, that my ears are not starving; I do not listen from my own extremity. I enjoy the grooves; I laugh sometimes at the bathos of the lyrics ('Real Wild'); I like the fierce interplay and the surprise of what new collaborators allow. But I listen differently, and from another kind of distance.

December 2007, and it's a full year since the last studio recording - one of the longest breaks over 30 years of Jandek LPs. I want to hear him starve again. And I want to listen again from where I am starving.

Links to articles on Jandek's performances.

Excellent 8 minute radio piece on Jandek.

Ideas

W. is telling us about ideas. He's had one idea, which took him 15 years to formulate. 15 years! 

'How many ideas have you had?', says W. I tell him I'm not sure. What's the sign of an idea? 'They have to be clear and distinct', says W. 'Clear and distinct.'

What I want is to be loved, W. has decided. 'You want to be adored,' he says. W.'s much less concerned with being adored. 'That's why I can have ideas', he says. He can work in silence for years. He doesn't need external affirmation. He's like a mole, he says. Digging, with his little paws working away and the wet soil on his nose.

Sometimes, W. concedes, it's as if I have ideas. I once spoke to him very movingly about the Phaedrus, for example, and the reason why Socrates has to leave the city to talk to his friend. W. immediately lays claim to any idea I might have in his articles. I would do the same, he says. But of course, my ideas are always wrong. They're full of pathos, he says, and they sound correct, but in fact they are no such thing. 'You always get the Greek wrong. Always.'

But sometimes, for a moment, the clouds do clear. 'You manage to speak sense', says W., 'or something like sense.'

'There was that pub in Oxford', W. remembers. 'We all fell silent and listened in wonder. Not to what you said, which may or may not have been sensible, and in fact probably wasn't; it was probably the usual pathos and hot air, but that you could say it.

'You of all people. No one expects it of you. Quite the opposite in fact. Which is why it's so surprising.' W. himself was amazed. 'And there was that time on the docks in Plymouth. The clouds parted. You spoke sense for nearly an hour.' What did I speak about? W. can't remember. But he'd been amazed, he remembered that.

'You should never hang on to conversations,' says W. He never does. But he's a great believer in discussion and friendship. 'Not like you. You're not capable of friendship. You're always about to betray me. All you want is to be adored', says W.

My 'Vest Phase'

W. admires the rituals of football. That's what it's all about, he says, as we sit among the football fans in the pub, the ritual. You go to the pub, then to the match and then back to the pub to discuss the match. It's the ritual that matters. But you don't know anything about football, do you? Or discussion. It's enough you can do to drink. That's all you do night and day, isn't it: drink. It's why you're so fat, isn't it, fatboy?

W. is impressed by my arms. 'They're huge', he says. How come he's never noticed before?, he wonders. It must be my vests. 'You're going through a vest phase', he says, 'and it doesn't become you.' How many vests do I have, he asks me. Thirty. 'Thirty vests! All the same colour?' Yes, all the same colour. Olive green. 'Thirty olive green vests', says W. 'They make you look fat'. But what about my arms? 'Oh yes, you've got big arms. Too big. They're monstrous.'

Loyalty

W., who has a keen interest in military history, is telling us about the Greek phalanx. The soldiers locked their shields together, he says to form a great defensive wall. Their spears would poke out the front. Together, loyal, they were almost invincible, says W. Of course you wouldn't understand any of this. You're not loyal. You know nothing of loyalty. You would break the phalanx, says W. You'd be the first one to break it.

W. admires loyalty everywhere he finds it. Take the animal kingdom. Swans! says W. They mate for life! You are the opposite of a swan, he says. Friendship means nothing to you. You'd betray me for a woman, he says. In fact, that's what you always do. You're always about to betray me, he says.