Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 03:49:29 +0100
From: Oeivind Idsoe <terje.idsoe-AT-online.no>
Subject: Re: Alliances


douglas wrote:

> So, it's quite the opposite, and perhaps even more dangerous. It's a bit
> like Deleuze's comment on Kurosawa's filming of Dostoyevski's "The Idiot":
> Kurosawa doesn't "adapt" Dostoyevski's novel, he in fact finds a
> cinematographic response. He has an "idea" in cinema that relates to an
> "idea" he found in the book. But the two ideas are different, incompatible,
> even if they communicate. An idea in cinema responds to an idea in
> literature.

Thanks for your long and *very* interesting (and, believe it or not, clarifying)
mail.

Regarding what you're saying above: Being a guy who makes stuff that sometimes
sound like music, but most often does not, I sometimes pick up on certain themes
from books, movies, music, whatever, and I can sort of "hear" timbres or bits and
pieces of tiny musical fragments that I might or might not decide to (try to) turn
into something semi-musical. In other words, a certain sentence, or perhaps a
picture of a building in an architecture magazine, might resonate so as to trigger
an idea that's not in any way compatible with what triggered my response
(behaviourism, anyone?), but they might still have something in common -- at least
to the person who's trying to convert his response into something else; the two
ideas communicate, but precisely because you can't make music out of literature, or
literature out of music, they are not, and can't be, adaptions or direct
translations from one field to another. It's impossible to fuse a sentence with a
sequence of notes or sounds, if you know what I mean, but since sentences release
timbres, you can become their sound by putting your ego (and samplers and
computers;) into the equation. The words & sentences & sounds/music remain
heterogenous, but there is something in the middle that never becomes the either-or
of these disparate elements.

(BTW, I'm not talking about the interesting and attractive effects of
"synaesthesia" (sp?) -- for example seeing certain colors when hearing certain
sounds -- although this physiological/psychological phenomena is very interesting
in its own right)

> I suppose this confuses the issue more than it clarifies it. I'll see if I
> can't somehow simplify it in the next few days.

I certainly enjoyed it, and was more enlightened than confused. But perhaps my
above con-Fusions confused things even more?

> Douglas Edric Stanley
> destanley-AT-Teaser.fr

/Oeivind/