Erik Satie, Biography, Borges (again)

One of this year’s fine Chrissie presents from Is was the complete piano works of Erik Satie. £13.99 strikes me as astonishing value for such a 5CD set performed by an apparently admired interpreter and replete with a generous accompanying booklet (written by an amusingly dry James Harding: “[The] high priest [of the Rosy Cross] was the ineffable Josephin Peladan, the heavily bearded perpetrator of numerous now quite unreadable novels…”). The point of this post was more to remark upon this tantalising reference:

“A large cigar box was found to contain over four thousand scraps of paper on which Satie had drawn, in coloured ink and in the finest ornamental detail, bizarre Gothic castles, weird machines, medieval fantasies and imaginary maps of nowhere.”

I’ve done a quick scan of the web, but haven’t been able to turn up any images of these. Something surely to mention to Geoff over at bldgblog who I’ve just discovered via City Of Sound.

I think I might read a biography of Satie next – that is after I’ve finished reading the Borges biography and rereading the Collected Fictions – so maybe sometime in 2007! The biography looks very promising, although I’m always rather nervous reading this type of work, particularly when it’s about my most beloved artists. I can’t help but feel that there’s a real danger of making the subject’s art banal by grounding it in the artist’s life. The work of William Burroughs or Jorge Borges or Georges Perec has an otherworldly fascination that causes it to transcend the everyday and transport the reader into other, unsuspected, realms. It’s this aspect – the unknown, the unthought (but still moving, involving, provoking) – that causes me to return again and again to their work. My ideal response would a creative trans-media analysis that referred as much to cutting edge music, electronic communities, social change, global warming, art, etc., etc. as it might the milieu and historial background of the artist. In other words, an imaginative (re)contextualisation that responds – in kind – to the leaps of imagination of the original subject, without eclipsing him/her. A tightrope walk, surely, but I’d argue more of a reflection of how we experience art and keep it alive by making (often very imaginative) connections to our own lives and cultural experiences. We construct a personal latticework around the subject by conducting research on websites, talking to friends, assimilating the metadata on album covers, catching snatches of radio programmes and so on. Wouldn’t it be good to find or develop a piece of software that would act as an intuitive scrapbook for collecting such snippets and keeping them together in a floating self-determined hierarchy. It would have to be experienced fullscreen (a la Coverflow), but perhaps mixed up with some of Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus.

PS: re the Collected Fictions – I received this as a present a couple of years back and was horrified by the abysmal quality of the translation by Andrew Hurley (see my comments on the Amazon.com page, but since picking up the Penguin centenary booklet with five Borges stories I’ve finally started reading it (at times through gritted teeth – I really can’t think that Borges would have liked their style, despite his playful propensity for remix translations). I will source the Giovanni translations when I can find some time.

MP3: Erik Satie / (Lent) à Maurice Ravel, from Trois Sarabandes (1887)