Further to the recent Dire Straits controversy, I decided to spend the 79 pence to get the 8.5 minute live version (from Alchemy). Most of the extra minutes on the recording are shockingly bad 80s stadium rock filler, so the core of the song itself is basically the same.
On my main points, I was essentially correct.
- First, he doesn’t mention the non-word streetsussed in either the first verse or the last, and there is no mistaking the fact that Romeo is, in fact, singing a serenade to or on the streets.
- On the question of keeping bad company, as some lyric sites (and the Guardian) would have it, he changes the line to say, “keeping rock ‘n’ roll company” which tends to confirm my belief that he’s keeping the beat and the band company.
- Finally, on the vexed question of Orion, it is absolutely clear in the live version that the word that finishes the line ends with an N consonant and not an M consonant. So, no, it’s not the (bewilderingly well-loved mishearing) bars of a rhyme, but the bars of Orion, which would be the upright bits in the constellation as opposed to the horizontal belt.
So, there it is. I’ve spent £1.58 on some compressed music and listened to it through an £800 pair of speakers, and I am now 100% positive in my correctiosity.
In other news, I finally got around to reading The Name of the Rose, which I picked up in the school library sale last year. It’s a nice hardback edition with a bookmark (needed) and an introduction by David Lodge (not really needed). It was brand new, bought by the school as part of a job lot and not required. I had never read this book before, and wasn’t sure what to expect. I have seen the film of course, which cleverly picks out the murder mystery story and doesn’t dwell on the stuff about popes and emperors and the debate about Christ’s poverty, nor does it have much to say on Umberto Eco’s use of bricolage in constructing the book from fragments of other books.
So, having read it, I’m now puzzled as to its immense popularity and best-seller status. I have several theories. Theory number one is that people read it for the murder mystery (given away in Lodge’s Introduction, by the way, which is poor form, apart from the fact that everyone has now seen the film). The problem with that is, we know that mysteries and thrillers are popular, so did people really need this literary version of a mystery?
I’d have to conclude is that (the) people (who bought it in such large numbers) are incredibly pretentious, and though they enjoyed the murder mystery they would never have lowered themselves to read a proper example of genre fiction, so they lapped up this more respectable example because it made them look intelligent. Or so they thought. They could of course have hidden a Michael Connelly inside the cover of The Name of the Rose and achieved the same effect.
Theory number two is that people bought the book in large numbers out of curiosity but then didn’t get around to reading it, or started it and gave up after 100 pages. The effect for the publishers is the same. That nice Simon Mayo often talks about the 100-page rule or the 30-page rule, however strict your criteria are for deciding whether to read on. I rarely give up on a book myself, but Eco himself has said that he was aware that the first 150 pages or so were a real drag, so that only the truly committed would continue.
I like theory number two better for its Occam-like simplicity. Other best sellers in this vein include that Stephen Hawking book, A Brief History of Time, James Gleik’s book on Chaos Theory, and large sections of The Lord of the Rings. I’m convinced that no sane person can read that book without skipping the boring bits.
The Name of the Rose is full of lists, categories, long discourses that catalogue the world in mediaeval terms. Luckily the BBC Four series on the Mediaeval Mind was fresh in mine. But the long lists were dense, and very heavy going, eminently skippable, once you got the gist. Clearly, naming things is one of the major themes of the book, and the nature of signs (as in semiotics as well as the paranoid mediaeval style), is what Eco is really interested in, hence the title and the latin riddle that finishes the novel: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
This line, a quote, refers to the materiality of the signifier, the key differences between the thing itself, its name, and its meaning. There are various translations of the line, which you can read about in the Introduction, or on Wikipedia. Signs, according to semiotics, have two parts, but if you take into account the (literal) materiality of the signifier, they have three. This idea appeals to me because, as you know, I am fond of typography, and always pay attention to the forms of the letters, their shapes, as well as to the words they form and the things that the words mean.
Eco has said that he likes the idea of the rose, because roses are so heavy with symbolism (ironically , often used when introducing students to semiotics) that they’re actually fairly worthless as signifiers, because they could mean anything (like the colour red, in fact). But, you know, at least the rose, when it’s a rose, is a rose, whereas when the flower is gone, all we have left are words. Put in my terms, at least a beautifully designed alphabet is aesthetically pleasing, whereas often what is printed with them is fairly ordinary.
So everything comes in threes, including signs, and The Name of the Rose is three books in one. Not having had a classical education, at least one of those books meant very little to me. On the other hand, I was quite able to feel the sense of loss involved in the various layers: the lost volume of Aristotle, the dead (nameless) girl, the burned library, youth, and so on. I enjoyed the film a lot, and it’s a fairly faithful adaptation of the mystery part of the novel. I don’t dig literary fiction, I don’t remember any of my Latin from school, and so I found the book heavy going, but not so heavy that I gave up. In fact, once I got over the hump of the first 150 pages I quite got into it, and if I hadn’t been on holiday I would have gone scrabbling onto Wikipedia to look up the various historical events referred to in the novel.
I’m still left with the puzzle of the best seller. Why? Are we talking about vast numbers of people reading a quite difficult book for the pleasures offered by its mystery plot? Or are we talking about vast numbers of people turned on by semiotics? You have to wonder. Vast numbers of people appeared to think that the word “streetsussed” appeared in a song, so anything is possible.
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P.S. You should know about me that as a theorist, I don’t go for the p*stmodern thing. P*stmodernism is the last refuge of the lazy student. Look closely enough at so-called p*stmodern art or literature and it turns out to be just more modernism. The Name of the Rose is a fine example of this. The Wikipedia article on the novel has this to say:
Umberto Eco is a significant postmodernist theorist and The Name of the Rose is a postmodern novel. For example he says in the novel “books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” This refers to a postmodern ideal that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality
Do they mean ideal or idea? I don’t know. It’s Wikipedia, so it could say something different tomorrow. On the other hand, what I always want to say when people talk about books speaking of other books being a p*stmodern idea, is what about The Waste Land, then? What the fuck is The Waste Land, you donkey, if not a stream of references to and quotes of other texts? Those are pearls that were his eyes etc.
Nobody can ever convince me that p*stmodernism is an idea with any validity until they can answer the riddle of The Waste Land, which is not even to get started on Yeats and centres that cannot hold.
But what do I know? Well, quite a lot actually, but don’t tell anyone.
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Tags: dire straits, name of the rose, novels, romeo and juliet, semiotics, umberto eco
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