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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Nick Cave A Study of Love Death and Apocalypse by Roland Boer In the Vale of Tears: Historical Materialism, Volume 52. In the Vale of Tears brings to a culmination the project for a renewed and enlivened debate over the interaction between Marxism and religion. It does so by offering the author's own response to that tradition. It simultaneously draws upon the rich insights of a significant number of Western Marxists and strikes out on its own. Thus, it argues for the crucial role of political myth on the Left; explores the political ambivalence at the heart of Christianity; challenges the bent among many on the Left to favour the unexpected rupture of kairós as a key to revolution; is highly suspicious of the ideological and class alignments of ethics; offers a thorough reassessment of the role of festishism in the Marxist tradition; and broaches the question of death, unavoidable for any Marxist engagement with religion. While the book is the conclusion to the five-volume series, The Criticism of Heaven and Earth , it also stands alone as a distinct intervention in some burning issues of our time. Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo. Roland Boer is Professor of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China (Beijing). He has published extensively on Marxism, theology, political theory and biblical criticism. His most recent works are Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology (Haymarket 2013), Nick Cave: A Study of Love, Death and Apocalypse (Equinox 2012), The Earthy Nature of the Bible (Palgrave 2012), and Lenin, Religion, and Theology (Palgrave 2013). Le informazioni nella sezione "Su questo libro" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo. News bytes & more… New bytes, music, film, books, articles, reviews, releases, etc: Due May 2010 : Nick Cave: A Study of Love, Death and Apocalypse by Roland Boer. Introduction 1. Searching the Holy Books 2. The Total Depravity of Cave’s Literary World 3. Some Routine Atrocity, or Apocalyptic 4. Death 5. God, Pain and the Love Song 6. Jesus of the Mon, or Christology 7. Hearing Round Corners: Nick Cave Meets Ernst Bloch Conclusion: Gates to the Garden – The Search for Redemption Equinox Publishing (abstract/details) Cover by Jeff Iffe. NICK CAVE NOTEBOOK: – View pages from Nick Cave’s notebooks at The Bad Seeds official site. CANNES FILM FESTIVAL: – Rumour has it that The Wettest County (renamed Lawless ), the film collaboration from John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, will be on the Cannes Film Festival 2012 lineup. – Blixa Bargeld recently mentioned that he plans to attend a conference on music downloading and copyright enforcement at Cannes 2012. Mick Harvey & JP Shilo music + Autoluminescent review under the cut! MUSIC NEWS: – ‘The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends’ album will be released on April 21st. Limited editions will contain small blood samples from the collaborators. AUTOLUMINESCENT (short article/review): – Rowland S. Howland: Death of the Party (New Zealand Herald, Mar 31, 2012) “Rowland wanted the film finished whatever happened and facing mortality was one of the reasons he first wanted us to make it,” says Richard Lowenstein, who with Lynn-Maree Milburn produced Autoluminescent. “He said the film should be [as much] about chronicling what was happening to him at the time as it was about recording the past.” MUSIC: – Mick Harvey and JP Shilo – Sonny Boy From ‘The Journey Is Long’ by the Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project. Total Depravity or the Failure of Creation: A Review of Roland Boer’s Nick Cave: A Study of Love, Death & Apocalypse. “I don’t believe in an interventionist God But I know, darling, that you do” – Into My Arms “I believe in God I believe in mermaids too I believe in 72 virgins on a chain Why not? Why not?” – Mermaids. The incredibly prolific Roland Boer is perhaps best known for his monumental Criticism of Heaven and Earth series which traces the importance and engagement with religion one finds in Marxist thought (currently three of the projected five volumes have been published). Among the books we would expect to find, including his recent collection The Earthly Nature of the Bible seeing him returning to his primary training in biblical studies in order to uncover the earthy and crude character of much of the Bible, his recent book on Nick Cave might seem a strange addition. Yet what we find here is typical of Boer’s work in general; combining a clarity of writing, ease with difficult concepts, genuine insights, and all presented with his typical crude and roguish sense of humor. More importantly what we find it is not some hobbyhorse book, but one that offers a genuinely interesting reading of Nick Cave’s artistic output (more on that below) and which fits within Boer’s own research agenda of Marxism and theology. Here I will outline the contents of the book before turning to a disagreement I hope can move along into an interesting conversation. Like Boer himself, Nick Cave hails from Australia, though for a number of decades has lived in Europe and South America, currently residing in England. His music has a certain universality about it though, beginning as a vocalist for the discordant punk band The Birthday Party (returning somewhat with his Grinderman project) and transitioning into the more lyrical and sedate style we find with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Boer separates these two periods neatly into his Old Testament period (where Cave opens his mouth and curses God) and his New Testament period (where Cave’s interest in Christology becomes apparent). The reason that Boer gives for this Biblical separation is well grounded in Cave’s own artistic output as, from his lyrics to his plays and novels, we see an obsession with the Christian Bible. Boer goes so far as to claim that Cave’s work constitutes a place where “Bible, autobiography and Christology come together in a potent mix (7).” And having a Biblical scholar guide us through the many references in Cave’s work to the Bible was helpful and even, if you’re a fan, exciting to see how some of the lyrics were crafted. But this isn’t a book merely dedicated to exploring Biblical and religious allusions as Boer ultimately critiques Cave for his biography being couched within a capitalist framework that holds up the authentic individual and his Christology being ultimately heretical. The second is perhaps a bit questionable, though Boer writes, “After all, is not heresy the ability to make a choice, from hairesis , the ability of an individual to strike on a path of his or her own? It is not for nothing that the churches have struggled to keep heresy on the list of damnable sins, for the ideology of liberalism is so much part of our landscape that the charge of heresy these days evokes the dark and dingy times of medieval power and usual brings forth a laugh or mere curiosity that it could still be invoked (83).” This understanding of heresy may have some truth to it, but there is also a sense in which heresy, in the mouths of poets like Attar and Rumi (whose work I would argue is thematically similar to Cave’s), is a deeper fidelity. I also worry somewhat about holding an atheist to a charge like heresy when he engages with Christology as I am unsure of its meaning in the analysis and I would have liked to see Boer struggle with that a bit more (especially considering the place of orthodoxy and deviation in Marxism and his own admission that “heretical Christology […] I must admit has its appeal at certain points (83)”). What Boer truly offers those interested in Cave’s work, especially his music, is a deep philosophical engagement with the form of the music itself. Boer tells us early in the text that most of the other studies have focused explicitly on the lyrics and sometimes moved to Cave’s poetry, novels, plays, and screenplays. Boer does give us that analysis, to great effect, in the majority of the book, taking us through the themes of love, death, and apocalypse mentioned in the subtitle, always through the lens of the Bible, autobiography, and Christology. But he seems most proud of the fact that he analyses the music by leaning heavily on Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of music, mostly found in the opening essay of his Spirit of Utopia . Bloch’s philosophy famously accounted for music by focusing on the basic category of note and what grew up around it (hearing, voice, song, dance and rhythm). Bloch builds off of this to present us with a kind of typology of Cave’s music, arguing that his most basic form was the discordant song (OT outlook) and then the attempts to solve it through the forms of hymn and lament (though he also includes here a type he calls the “sinister song” which brings discordance into these styles), and then finally the dialectical song where this discordance is allowed full reign in the form of the hymn (such that the sinister song is an important step in this direction). It is this dialectical song where the search for redemption finds its place in Cave’s music, though under Boer’s very careful analysis and evaluation, very few of Cave’s songs make this grade (I have to say I was sad to see that one of my favorite Cave albums, The Boatman’s Call , is panned by Boer as nearly unlistenable whereas I see those songs as incredibly rich, though perhaps I have given in to the temptation of the hymn, as Boer calls it).

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