You can now comment on this blog. I have added this feature experimentally because I think I write better if I don't believe I have an audience. We'll see. An audience colours the creation process. Of course you always have some concept of a reader in your head when you write, but there are different levels of expectation - the second album of an artist is normally worse than the first, for instance, because now they know people are listening. All the creative energies of the debut had been towards making people listen. Anyway, I am reminded of (perhaps because I read it yesterday) the preface to Jerome K Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. Perhaps one of the best prefaces ever:
'One or two friends to whom I showed these papers in MS. having observed that they were not half bad, and some of my relations having promised to buy the book if it ever came out, I feel I have no right to longer delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, public demand, I perhaps should not have ventured to offer these mere "idle thoughts" of mine as mental food for the English-speaking peoples of the earth. What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change.'
3 comments:
Well I for one think that it's a wonderful thing that you have added the ability to comment.
You have a very interesting blog here which I enjoy very much.
On the subject of second albums I think it is the opposite.
The first contains music written over a much longer period which has been specifically designed to bring people in who don't know the band (eg. to make people at a gig to see somebody else notice them) which is why they work so well.
The second album is usually either an attempt by the band / artist to copy something that happened by accident on the first album which they probably didn't understand or to prove themselves as more serious than they actually are and so album two begins the long slow disappearance up their own arses.
I don't think that's the opposite of what I said - I think it's the same, isn't it? I agree with you entirely, anyway.
What I forgot to add to this was another interesting aspect: film is possibly the only medium where its products cannot be made unless an 'audience' (producers, financers, actors etc) has already approved of it.
Yes. I think I had my brain on backwards.
As they might say, in LA, my bad.
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