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Maria Turner and Sufjan Stevens

Nearly all of Paul Auster’s books are based in New York, and in each one the city is a central character, with a real identity that reflects the mood of the novel (I think Douglas Coupland does this with Vancouver too).

In Leviathan, the character of Maria Turner is based almost entirely on the artist Sophie Calle. About twenty pages of the book are spent detailing Maria’s work as an artist, and Calle’s projects are borrowed verbatim here, as are Auster’s own experiences in reflexively creating the narrator. “All of my works are stories, and even if they are true stories, they are also invented”, Maria says.

One of Maria’s first projects in the book is to travel to all fifty states in America, spending exactly three weeks in each one (although I’m not sure if Sophie Calle ever actually did this). The point of this is to experience regulated time in relation to place, an exercise in visceral location-focused being.

So.

I saw Sufjan Stevens play in the Village on Friday, and loved it. Perhaps not the best performance ever (and a terrible venue), but seeing him live led me to understand his music in more ways than I had before. He does the same thing with his music as Auster does in his writing - he creates a sense of place through location-based storytelling. Being at the gig felt like reading a book or seeing a play.

Echoing Maria Turner’s project, Sufjan is planning to record an album about each of the 50 states - he’s done Michigan and Illinios so far. The music is extremely narrative, with emotive stories about smalltown happenings, the lives of their founding fathers, and the people who live there now. It’s also deeply respectful, and goes quite a way to investigating the psyche of a place. The landscape is defined by a series of tiny litereary vignettes.

Auster hangs his sense of postmodern solidarity on New York, because the city suits that mood. Sufjan Stevens is coming at it from the other side, allowing his characters to be informed by their location. But they are both essentially addressing the same thing, the relationship between person and place.

If psychogeography looks at how we are affected by our surroundings, what is happening when our environment reflects our behaviour? The concept of adaptive architecture is based around this, I think.

And what’s Sufjan going to do when he gets to New York?


This entry was posted on Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Maria Turner and Sufjan Stevens”

  1. kevin dunne Says:
    October 26th, 2005 at 2:07 am

    can you expand on your question “what is happening when our environment reflects our behaviour?” or ask it a different way? i like the post and have a few thoughts but don’t fully get what you mean.

    it’s not you baby, it’s me, i swear!

    to be honest, i’m a bit thick. living in america is very easy on the brain. everything is so user friendly and dumbed down that one need only use ones brain for work and coordinating the lifting of a pint to ones lips.

    might be an interesting discussion actually, how a country can evolve to be so easy to “use.” is that good social and infrastructural design? can ireland or any other country learn from this? or is it because the USA is so young and has had the opportunity to learn from other nations mistakes?

    enough shite out of me…

  2. emmetc Says:
    October 26th, 2005 at 1:41 pm

    First off, this was very much a thinking-out-loud post, so apologies for the lack of coherence. But that’s what a blog is, dammit.

    To relate the question to Paul Auster, I think the characters in his books are very affected by where they are. Auster’s version of New York is one of alienation and solitude, and this is reflected in how his characters feel. This is a literary device, but it’s a real phenomenon too. Sufjan’s characters, on the other hand, make up the fabric and define the personality of their place (or at least that’s the feeling I get from them). Anyway, I don’t think their work specifically relates to what my head is trying to get at.

    So I guess the question relates to how we change our environment - how our behavior affects the places we live in. How does the way we look at the world manifest itself in our surroundings?

    As for society and infrastructure, I don’t know. But if a country is easy to use, are the people living in it really interacting (in a two-way sense) with it? “Easy to use” suggests to me that the place you live in can be a consumer product, rather than a culture that you can take an active part in developing. Maybe we should be thinking about what our physical environment says about us (take a bow, Irish housing development 1995-2005). What about the future?

    Here’s a story by Gregory Bateson from the book How Buildings Learn:

    New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be two feet square, forty-five feet long.

    A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays?

    One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years and asked him about oaks.

    And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

    Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

    A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture.

  3. Nick Says:
    October 26th, 2005 at 7:53 pm

    Oh, as for being train-of-thought-y here we go (yes, I am hijacking your blog).

    I’ve always had a niggling feeling that Irish expressed me better as a language. It’s ‘way of saying’ things seemed to fit with the environment I saw better…A field near where I grew up was just a field, until I heard it called the Spiddle Field (you of galway will know that means it once held a ‘hospital’) On further examination, that particular part of ground has had documented healing qualities since time out of mind, and had been the site of a hospital for aeons, presumably.

    Ballynarry, again in Co. Down. No one can decide if it’s Baile an Naire (Town of the Shame) or Baile na nGaire (Lauging town?). Anyway, rambling! I always had the feeling that Connemara, or the Rosses, reflected the Irish language perfectly..rugged, cold, dense, unloved, persistant but embued with an indelible sense of poetic color and brimming with metaphor. My belief is that the language we use in a certain place changes the apperance of that place in our eyes to match the ‘color’ or ‘blas’ of the language itself. Linguisticly, we carve out the shape of the land with our tongues.

    Oh, and if you haven’t already, listen to other sufjan-ites recordings by Joanna Newsom or Devendra Banhart. I’ve not heard the latter yet, but if Joanna’s ‘Milk Eyed Mender’ is comparable to Devendra’s music, it’ll leach onto my subconscious like a barnacle. Oh, and quick dig. Sufjan’s ‘whimsy’ really irritates me. I’ve tried to like him, I really have, but I just can’t help telling him to stop whining all the time. Sorry.

    You can have your blog back now ::blush::

  4. Dara Beasley Says:
    November 13th, 2008 at 3:07 am

    tz4jgtqvelk5ucc0

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