What ILX Threads Have You Printed Out For Offline Reference?

When the question arises, 'Who are the most overrated band ever?', it's never easy to come up with a satisfactory answer - because a band that you hate might not really be that overrated, and a band that seems clearly overrated might not be, in themselves, that offensive. Still, Orange Juice might be one, temporary port of all while trying to answer that question. Because
a) their fans are apparently legion; b) their fans are hyperbolic and given to wildly enthusiastic statements; c) the music itself usually seems unexceptionable, dull, a little ragged perhaps; d) the legions of hyperbolic fans are never willing or able to explain what is it that they love so about the records.
Now, asking fans why they like something can be a red herring, an unfair question. Love may be a thing that we can't fully explain to ourselves, let alone to others: and if we feel it sincerely and strongly, we may not want to bother trying to justify it to another, especially as - who knows? - we may feel our love slipping away from us in our inept bids at justification. So I sympathize with fans who don't want to explain why they're fans: perhaps they can see that there is no truly final vocabulary here, no ultimate justification beyond a passion which will do for now.
Still, I think that *some* kind or degree of 'description', if not explanation, might sometimes not be too much to ask. I have had the same problem with fans of the mysterious and difficult Go-Betweens. The Go-Betweens may or may not be the best band ever to walk the earth: but it is darned frustrating trying to get a G-Bs fan even to *begin* to tell you why. And my experience re. Orange Juice has been much the same.
Classic? Dud? I don't know. At the moment I'm unconvinced. Can somebody break their silence and put me to rights?

-- February 13, 2001.

Yes. I am some kind of an aesthete interested in small beauties, private sensations that feel like transcendence, epiphanies and moments snatched. I am also terribly nostalgic. I don't claim that any of this has anything to do with The Romantic Movement.

-- June 25, 2001.

OK, OK.
1. Don't read him. Dubliners is blank and empty of significance, the Portrait is theocentric and tedious, Exiles is an embarrassing failure and never revived, Ulysses is a homely family homily in disguise, Finnegans Wake is a self-indulgent crossword puzzle no-one should bother with.
2. Don't get distracted by anecdotes - people rehashing some apocryphal story about something that JJ once said to WBY, or something one newspaper said about U. It's astounding how untrue most of these are.
3. I don't know that anyone else had, or has, registered the movement of things like him - objects, I mean, fluttering pieces of torn paper blown on a light breeze under a railway bridge or eddying back and forth on a tide; a door opening or closing on imperfect hinges; the sort of things amid which we (still) live.
4. Not just 'things' but social processes - how many times have I been out for a night in a boozer or three and been reminded of Sirens / Cyclops / Oxen, the way that he understands how gatherings work, how geezers get together, come in at five and pop back at seven, pass a newspaper report around the table and try to find the funniest things to say about it, while someone colourfully offers another round;
5. or those ordinary actions that I was so astounded to find in U, first time around - getting up and bantering while cooking breakfast (milk, cream, lemon - simply beauties), walking home drunk in the middle of the night - things no-one ever notices about Joyce.
6. Felicities: colons: rhythms: full stops. Periods.
7. Lists: catalogues: series: sequences: successions: which interrupt a narrative and lurch sideways, out of 'time' and into frozen textual 'space', for as long as they want, until they have become as extraordinarily funny as they care to be.
8. 'Humanity' - I mean, compassion, care for 'ordinary people', interest in things that others had thought beneath them, 'daily life'.
9. Yet not just a generalized wash of 'liberalism', perhaps - noteworthy enough in itself, next to so much of the rest of modernism - but something harder and more clear-eyed in its political calculations. Wells called the Portrait a book that only an Irish Catholic could have written, a quasi-Republican complaint, a Fenian yawp: what if the mass of historical data and learning in Ulysses and maybe beyond is really an immense, dense, complex political analysis, the pen as scalpel, 'lancet of my art', casually pricking the bulbous balloon of post-Victorian imperial culture?
10. Read him: Dubliners is hard as the side of an engine (Pound), the Portrait dares to denote childhood as no-one else had, Ulysses is all we need, the Wake might be what we need when we've just about, improbably, had enough of all we thought we needed.

-- August 29, 2001.

What *did* happen?

Since then I printed out the Kraftwerk love story to read on the train. And I printed out Chaki's "If peeing in your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis" and stuck it on a postcard of the Pope. Although to be fair he looked more like he was fouling himself.

Oh! Hang on! I actually get Trayce's joke/reference above now!