How It Is Done
Another completely marvellous Burial interview, this time by mark k-p.
This one is especially lucid about how he makes tunes: on the one hand, the emphasis on just knocking them out, going quickly, hardly giving yourself time to think; on the other, “[t]he thing I love about M R James, it’s almost like you learn a lesson off the stories, which is to be obsessed with a similar kind of effect until you get it right, because you’re basically circling similar ideas”. Every time I’ve had a period of high creativity, when music or poetry or whatever just keeps coming and you feel confident enough to just throw things away because you know there’s more where that came from, it’s been like that. Trying and failing to write a PhD was, needless to say, the opposite of being like that. Trying to write a book, well, I’m trying to keep it like that…
December 9th, 2007 at 1:12 am
What is your book about?
December 9th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
The title is “Cold World”. It’s about the aesthetics of dejection (G.M. Hopkins, Coleridge, Xasthur) and the politics of militant dysphoria (Patricia Highsmith and the Baader-Meinhof “gang”).
December 10th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
As I’m sure I’ve told you, one of my colleagues asserts there is no such thing as a finishing point for a PhD – there is just a SodIt point. Another colleague, who has finally completed and submitted hers after years of inactivity, says her supervisor maintains you do not ’submit’ a PhD, you ‘abandon’ it…
Your erstwhile PhD colleague Sarah Y. completed her PhD viva when about 8 months pregnant. I imagine pregnancy is quite conducive to the type of application required when writing up.
When I have submitted anything substantial (like a book manuscript) I find it very difficult to write anything at all for some months – I don’t just mean I can’t motivate myself, I mean the creative juices don’t flow.