Anodyne
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
 
2007's first title: Humphrey Jennings' Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, recommended to me last spring by Peter Culley and promptly filed away in the office's stacks, where it lay buried in the strata, only to be unearthed on New Year's Eve. An imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution, told in multiple, overlapping, frequently contradictory voices, and a form that I can hardly wait to baldly plagarize for my ever-expanding account of First Contact with art collecting aliens.

Humphrey Jennings:

"And these images -- what do they deal with? I do not claim that they represent truth -- they are too varied, even contradictory, for that. But they represent human experience. They are the record of mental events. Events of the heart. They are facts (the historian's kind of facts) which have been passed through the feelings and the mind of an individual and have forced him to write. And what he wrote is a picture -- a coloured picture of them. His personality has coloured them and selected and altered and pruned and enlarged and minimised and exaggerated. Admitted. But he himself is part, was part of the period, even part of the event itself -- he was an actor, a spectator in it. So his distortions are not so much distortions as one might suppose. Moreover they altered him. The event had its effect on him. Undistorted him, opened his eyes."
- posted by cjb @ 12:17 PM


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