Experiment
This is an experiment. Please make it work.
posted by Alp at Sunday, May 21, 2006
21 May 2006
About this
Something unusual was happening in SW Wales when I was a child – subcultures, social experiments, naked hippies dancing around maypoles. I'm researching a PhD project into remembrances of things past - how our sense of the past informs our sense of self. This enquiry presumes that the past is not fixed, rather it is partly constructed through a shared or collective consciousness, which is why I’m inviting you now to share your memories of certain events, moments, and ideas. A childhood in Wales gave a lot of us a unique experience and a lot of the ‘hippy’ kids, I think, have a wonderfully insightful way of perceiving and interacting with the world. But we also have a very different past from many of our peers, and some ‘site specific’ hang-ups! There were some amazingly off-the-wall characters around and some pretty weird shit happened. I’d like to know which bits you remember, in words and photos. Some of this stuff might be sensitive, so if you are posting photos or texts or relevant transcripts or notes or poems or songs (you could scan them or send them to me ‘snail-mail’ – I will be very careful) onto this weblog please be aware of that, and do so with an open mind.Previous Posts
- Elsan
- The Elephant Fair
- The Elements
- Ecstasy
- ‘Early days’
- Culture clashes
- Commune
- Cults
- Alternative lifestyle
- Acid
3 Comments:
Sent : 25 May 2006 03:11:16
To : kiernanna@hotmail.com
Subject : re hippies in Wales
Inbox
Hi Anna,
You probably don't remember me, my names Will, I was the tall, skinny brother or Catherine Rogers.
Anyhow I just bumped into your blog. I have to say this is fascinating . . . probably just my post-modern narcissistic nostalgia, but I often wondered what happened to this subculture. I desperately pretended I was "not a hippie kid" back then, but hey it all comes out in the wash . . .
I think it was a social experiment. I think its aspirations were to free us from the perceived materialism of the rest of modern culture . . . but sadly I do think it failed. Our insistence on being "alternative" just made us feel special, and in turn this made us even more narcissistic. . . a kind of materialism to our own self image.
Hey but the concept of your PhD sounds really cool! re 'the past is not fixed, rather it is partly constructed through a shared or collective consciousness'
Is that true? I mean obviously the experience of it is seriously magnified when we think about it . . . I mean right now I remember everything . . I think I could even speak Welsh if i tried : ) . . . but the facts themselves they are what they are. However I do believe that any perspective has to be somehow shared in a collective consciousness before it can become objective reality. Maybe thats the same thing?
Good luck! Curious to know how this all goes . . .
PS I guess the alternative thing rubbed off on me somewhere . . I now art direct a popular spiritual magazine in the US
PPS Are you in touch with Merlin at all?
Will Rogers
Creative Director EnlightenNext
413 637 6033
will@wie.org
wie.org
‘This memoir is a subjective truth’ : Marketing the real and the desire for literary ‘authenticity’
Abstract for The International Conference of the Book 2006
In James Frey’s apology to the reading public following on from The Smoking Gun’s (TSG) revelation that his ‘memoir’, A Million Little Pieces, was largely made up, the author states that, ‘… I didn’t initially think of what I was writing as non-fiction or fiction, memoir or autobiography…’ This apparently woolly thinking did little to help the author’s cause, since although Frey was unable to commit to form, his readers were convinced of the authenticity of Frey’s account of his life as an ‘Alcoholic a Drug Addict and a Criminal’.
Marketing functions much like libel. As James Frey’s lawyer pointed out in his cautionary letter to TSG, ‘A defendant in a libel case is accountable and liable, “for what is insinuated as well as what is stated explicitly” (Kapellas v Kofman, 1969). In other words, once the information is in the public domain it doesn’t matter if it is true or false because it is still ‘known’. The controversy means that the book is still in the public eye and therefore it is still in the bestseller lists.
The Frey debacle inevitably puts into question the publishing world’s manipulation of ‘the real’ for marketing purposes. What it doesn’t do is address the issue of why media consumers are so intent on believing what they read. In her follow up interview with Frey, Oprah began, ‘I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.’ But why should the authenticity of a personal history matter so much to readers?
This paper will argue that the role of the confessional narrative is twofold. As well as having a psychotherapeutic function, in which, as Blake Morrison suggests in Too True, the reader may feel ‘vindicated’, and will thus feel violated should the confessional – as in Frey’s case – prove false, but it is also a matter of faith. In a secular society, in which so much of life appears disengaged, the confessional is a place in which high emotion matters and issues are apparently resolved.
The Book Sales Yearbook 2004 (published by Nielson Bookscan/The Bookseller) shows that autobiographies have gone from representing 2.5% of consumer spend through the GRM in 1998 to 4.3% in 2003. That sales of autobiographies will continue to rise is not in question; but what it means to write an autobiography is.
This paper will seek to address some of the ethical and aesthetic concerns that emerge from the rise of the confessional in the context of an increasingly competitive literary market place.
Indicative bibliography:
Anderson, Linda (2001). Autobiography: The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge.
Ashley, Kathleen, et al., eds (1994). Autobiography and Postmodernism.
Cixous, Hélène. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing.
Frey, James (2005). A Million Little Pieces.
Goldsworthy, Vesna (2006). Chernobyl Strawberries, London: Atlantic.
Hewitt, Leah. Autobiographical Tightropes.
Morrison, Blake (1999). Too True, London: Granta.
The Book Sales Yearbook 2004 (published by Niels
william,
this might answer your question a little bit. i will answer more specifically soon!
i should point out that this blog only really relates to one chapter of my phd.
where do you live in the states?
cheerio
anna x
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