The association of the Oxford University Faculty of Music with the Radcliffe Trust resulted in the recent formation of the Radcliffe Residency. This post will entail the close association of a string quartet with the faculty, the chosen ensemble working closely with both student composers and performers over the next two years. For the selection, each quartet performed a 30-minute programme, which was followed with a practical demonstration of their abilities by coaching student chamber groups in the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D minor.

All four quartets performed repertoire ranging from classical to contemporary, thus illustrating their adaptability and suitability to work with student composers. Given that all quartets are renowned upon the British chamber music scene, the assured performances were to be expected. The prominence of cello within the Finzi quartet suited an explosive and rich rendition of two movements from Ravel’s quartet. Their suitability to contemporary works was exemplified with their eerie and tense Adès, with the group’s gradual intensification particularly effective.

A personal highlight of the concert was undoubtedly the Piatti quartet’s dynamic and engaging performances, with equally convincing interpretations of works including Smetana, Haydn and the contemporary Armenian composer, Artur Akshelyan. The strong bond between the group’s members was apparent not only when playing but also during the coaching section of the process, where each member contributed to a strong artistic vision to extend the student chamber ensemble’s work. The Benyounes Quartet brought a real presence to the second movement of Bartok’s String quartet number 2. Although the movement by Brahms sometimes lacked a degree of intensity, they brought a light and refined tone to their account of Haydn. The afternoon was concluded by the Cavaleri Quartet, with thoughtful realisations of Schnittke and Webern. Despite the drama brought to these works, it was their rich and thoughtful Haydn which particularly stood out. Yet it was in the coaching that the true suitability of the groups for the Residency became clear. A couple of the groups unfortunately neglected the pianist of the trio to focus on the violin and cello, but all the quartets made an audible impression upon the interpretations of their student ensemble.

The afternoon passed very quickly, such was the standard of the performers. Whichever quartet will be announced certainly holds exciting possibilities for the Faculty of Music throughout the two years of the Residency.

What is the creative process like behind your songs?

The creative process will always vary from song to song and in my 25 years with Radiohead, there have been many ways to crack the nut in that time. My role in Radiohead is to some extent, purely percussive, but we all continually review a song’s structure. But you also have to make the music exciting for yourself in order to produce vitality. That’s why we always try different approaches from record to record. You can see that in the about-turn from OK Computer to Kid A and again from In Rainbows to The King Of Limbs. With Radiohead, each record seems to be a reaction to the last one. Of course any creative relationship is going to have friction, but that’s the fuel to what you do. All of us in Radiohead come from a similar place musically but there’s certainly no party line. Somehow we always manage to find a way through seemingly insurmountable problems and we become a better band for it.

On my debut solo album, Familial, I worked most on what felt appropriate to the songs. These were a set of songs that grew out of me learning to sing and to write. It was a very hushed and private process for me. I wasn’t aiming to push any boundaries and instead I focused on keeping a sense of space, both through the instrumentation and the personal nature of the project. Within the record I constantly asked what kind of singing voice I had and then built up the instrumentation around that. In this sense it is a very naked, unadorned record and a true sense of where I’ve been coming from musically for the past decade. It’s been a steep learning curve for me and despite being a part of the song-making process ever since we started Radiohead, this really felt like starting over again.

How do you capture the particular sound-world you want in performance?

I think, for all of us in Radiohead, we’ve always learned to play our instruments in the context of a band as well as developing a very individual style. Within that we all have very catholic tastes and so like magpies, we borrow a bit from here and there. I never feel like I’ve mastered my influences but what I then do is integrate them into my own personal voice. That’s why Radiohead is unique – these very fine, distinctive voices all blending.

On Familial, I delegated drumming duties to one of my favourite musicians, Glenn Kotche. When I was writing my songs I couldn’t really hear drum parts. There’s a way that Glenn approached the material – finding all these lovely percussive textures in there – that allowed me to keep a sense of space in the songs without having to throw a strong backbeat in there that would mess with the atmosphere. Who I perform with is very important. With Glen, there was something there musically that just clicked. He has an incredibly distinctive, percussive voice and the whole range of dynamic in his playing.

The place of the performance also plays its part. In some ways, the shows that I’m playing at the Pegasus Theatre here in Oxford this week are a conclusion of what I’ve been working on with Familial. It feels appropriate to end that cycle in Oxford, as well as drawing attention to the work of the Pegasus Theatre, of which I’m a patron. All of the songs took root in the area so it’s nice to put them to bed here as well. It will be interesting to see where I go now. When you’ve been ploughing one furrow for eight years, you never get the complete picture.

How have you changed your approach to marketing a record?

Having been in music for a couple of decades, it often feels like we make it up as we go along. It’s definitely the best way for Radiohead. In a broader business sense we have tried different things. When we were at EMI we had a very skilled marketing department. But from our point of view we’ve always been learning more about how to get our music out to people. So with In Rainbows we used a pay-what-you-want digital approach. It was our attempt at finding something that would connect with people in a meaningful way. In Rainbows wasn’t a two fingers up at the corporate structure. It was just an exciting way at the time of releasing a record within the possibilities that digital tools allowed.

Radiohead’s drummer Phil Selway will play two intimate hometown gigs to raise funds for Oxford’s Pegasus Theatre on Thursday, November 10 and Friday, November 11, celebrating the theatre’s 50^th anniversary. Tickets are £25 and doors open 7pm. www.pegasustheatre.org.uk

Barely a fortnight before the sound of sirens roared through the riots in Peckham Rye, the London district had been singing a rather different tune. Stravinsky’s in fact. For one night only, 102 musicians from Oxford, Cambridge and the London Colleges gathered to perform his groundbreaking ballet music, The Rite of Spring, in a multi-storey car park. Surprised? This performance actually represents an emerging trend in the capital as a new generation of musicians and promoters challenge concert conventions. ‘The Rite of Spring Project’ was co-promoted by NONCLASSICAL, one of the more innovative ‘classical’ London club nights, founded by composer Gabriel Prokofiev in 2003, who featured after the performance with his own DJ set based on a remix project of The Rite.

With its grating dissonance, fragmentation, metric irregularity and extreme dynamics, the commission for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, rather ironically, provoked riots during its 1913 premiere in Paris, compelling police to shut down the show. Due to monumental innovations in composition over the last century, however, Stravinsky’s work falls differently onto our twenty first century ears since with serial, experimental and electroacoustic music under our belts, we are an unshockable generation. To us, Stravinsky sounds relatively tame, banal even. Where is the space for free improvisation, the ambiguous graphic score? What about pre-recorded sounds and instruments made from scrap metal? Now, more than ever, there is a need to restore the music’s startling impact, as it would have been to its original audience. 

When I interviewed Kate Whitley, Cambridge composer and organiser of the whole event, she offered some insight, ‘I think there is a need to restore ‘startling impact’ to the performance of all classical music! I think that in twenty first century performance practice, from superficial things like concert etiquette, stage manner and concert dress to more fundamental things about performance style and manner, the violence, impact and weirdness of a lot of classical music seems to get neutralised.’

The unexpected venue, with its rich acoustic, was provided by Bold Tendencies, a non-profit sculpture project who use the car park as an exhibition space. They are not alone in encouraging this radical recontextualisation of art. Vocal Futures, another musical outreach foundation also defines its events by use of spectacular performance space. The foundation came to the fore in April as they worked in association with the Cambridge Union Society on their high profile debate on the motion, ‘Classical music is irrelevant to today’s youth’, with DJ and producer Kissy Sell Out defending and Stephen Fry against the motion. 

When asked her reaction to the debate at her alma mater, Kate doesn’t mince her words, ‘It was a stupid notion – ‘classical’ music means so many different things! As does ‘irrelevant’. And a negative motion like that was obviously never going to pass. I don’t think it was a productive debate.’

While I would agree that the debate was not productive as an end in itself, the hype this musical discourse stimulated in the run-up to the event, by virtue of social media, cast a spotlight on the discipline. The process allowed the discussion of music and its place in the twenty first century to be approached more inclusively in a less specialised environment, inclining people to articulate their sense of the significance of music. It took the classical tradition out of its ivory tower  and placed it into a more public domain, an action which was reflected after the debate as it became available online and received considerable press coverage.

With the advancement of technology, the way in which we access and share music has changed as much as the techniques used to compose it. The ceremony of buying a record, removing it from its sleeve, placing it on the record player and carefully positioning the needle is vanishing from our cultural memory. Instead, the effortless, digital process affords instant, carefree satisfaction that extends into a certain cursory attitude towards music; any type of music can now belong in almost any area of human activity, it is not a remarkable sonic experience. While music has reached a peak in accessibility with Youtube, Spotify and Lastfm available at the click of a mouse, the real deal has become less accessible, as live performance remains an expensive and elitist venture, calling for the recent trend seen with NONCLASSICAL, Bold Tendencies and Vocal Futures.

Despite her enormous success with a sell-out in Peckham, Kate asserts that ‘to make long term changes, music education in state schools really needs to change. That real change will have to come from younger generations of players and composers, rather than from institutionalised outreach projects.’ While organisations such as the National Youth Theatre, Choir and Orchestra are providing experiences which are becoming increasingly unavailable in state schools, the groups remain dominated by privately educated students. 

In August, David Cameron turned to the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department for strategies to deal with Britain’s disaffected youth: what he should have done is ventured further south. Venezuela’s extraordinary El Sistema project is a publicly financed voluntary sector music education programme which offers a more positive and long term solution to Cameron’s problems.

Responsible for enabling 250,000 children to attend its music schools, with an overwhelming 90 percent from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, El Sistema employs music as the great leveller, alleviating social inequalities via the democratic nature of the symphony orchestra. This ‘old-fashioned’ practical approach to music-making is unique in its ability in encouraging self-expression and collaboration amongst young people, in a way that contemporary technological approaches to music making, which tend to be more solitary in their process, cannot. It seems acutely obvious to me that this is where the future of classical music belongs – where it is so desperately needed.

But for now, will technology save itself from itself? Is it possible that events advertised on social networking sites will have the power to inject some energy into our iTuned attitudes towards music, whether in government cuts or trends in concert going? Surely if we can coordinate riots up and down the country, the promotion of live performance should be almost as easy as, say, impulsively looting amid the furore of public disorder? We’ll see.

The difficulties of David

Benjamin McEvoy introduces Foster Wallace’s works

Foster Wallace was that rare breed of writer, indeed a rare kind of person, who strongly believed in the pleasures of hard work in reading and art. It feels like, in our television/internet/fast food culture, we have lost that. Wallace lamented the population’s growing affliction of not bothering with something – be it a complicated piece of music, a painting that is difficult to interpret, or his own dense collection of work – if that something does not immediately give you its pleasures in a neat little package. Wallace understood that there was, however, a very small corner of society that derived great pleasure through work. This minority think for themselves and enjoy doing so. They are not content to be spoon-fed. It is for this small pocket that Wallace writes. His books are a challenge. They are beautifully constructed Fabergé eggs. They are tapestries with the imperative ‘think’ woven delicately into them. The Pale King, Wallace’s posthumous work, has long sections communicating and exploring the powerful emotion of boredom – at the patient reader’s expense.

Infinite Jest, Wallace’s portrayal of the nature of addiction and entertainment, contains a baffling bombardment of vocabulary specific to the realms of geometry, tennis and stoners, clarified only by an extensive set of footnotes. His short story collection, Oblivion, delays reader gratification of events by inhabiting the consciousness of his characters for long, daunting, unparagraphed amounts of time. It isn’t just Wallace’s rhetorical tools that make him hard work, but his subject matter: disdain for popular culture, addiction and mental health pervade his narratives. The great unsaid being explored through fiction, enhanced and further saddened by the great man’s untimely death. It would be against the spirit of Wallace to take this feature as anything more than a small jump-off point into his work. Take no given knowledge from this, but approach him, think and reap the rewards.

‘This is Water’

Hattie Soper on Foster Wallace’s 2009 address to students in Ohio

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’’

During an address to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio, in 2005, Foster Wallace delivered a few words on the subject of ‘making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head’. His speech moves through scenes of the ‘stupid and infuriating’ difficulties of life and comes to a precarious rest with the reflection which must be constantly repeated like a mantra: ‘This is water, this is water’.

Foster Wallace’s way of tackling life involves vigilant self-monitoring, making ‘a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to,’ and as such gives a very vivid insight into Foster Wallace’s painfully acute perception of his own mind and of others.

But the bleakness of his speech comes from his understanding of the inaccessibility of others, as part of the isolation and constriction of self which magnifies and distorts the world and is potentially inescapable. The only way to try, though, is through efforts of compassion and mindfulness. ‘Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship’. And I suppose Oxford students need a shaking-up more than most to grasp the importance of avoiding worshipping what will ‘eat you alive’.  Foster Wallace’s excruciating level of awareness prompts both his depression and his hope. He fights through layers of banal cliché and ‘default settings’ to get at something real, which, for a moment, is possible.

Off the Wallace

 Matthew Perkins on Foster Wallace’s zany subject matter

In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men one of Foster Wallace’s ‘interviewees’ discusses a recurring fantasy. The institutionalised son of a physicist, he has fetishised a gesture of an actress in Bewitched, a circular flick of the hand which enables him to stop time and thereby sleep with the frozen athletic women in his local gym. His fantasy collapses as the ramifications of suspending the sun’s orbit, which he knew was at a ‘25. 53 degrees angle to the earth’s own spin’ and other such inconsistencies prove overwhelming: ‘The bed is so awash with sheafs of my calculations that there would be no space for me to masturbate even if I had been able to do so’. 

In McCain’s Promise, Foster Wallace interrogates the equally irreconcilable paradox of John McCain, the ‘anti-candidate’ on his 2000 campaign trail. Challenged by a woman at a Q&A session whose son’s patriotism had been knocked by slanderous cold-calls, McCain stops the meeting, offering to pull his negative ads if Bush does the same. Foster Wallace take us painfully through every possibility: can McCain  have meant every word as sincerely as his ‘straight talk’ campaign-line suggests? Did he twist the events to his political gain? McCain’s campaign is ‘a moment when an anti-candidate becomes a real candidate’; but ‘how can you sell someone’s refusal to be for sale?’.

Foster Wallace’s fiction asks questions concerned with the absurd and erotic, but  his message is also political. Over-intellectualised postmodernism can become meaningless and despairing, but Wallace insists that his readers find meaning in his strange characters and bizarre plot twists.

Art of Suicide

Joy Green discusses the effect of death on literary reputation

It’s hard to think about Foster Wallace without dealing with his suicide. In 2008 he hung himself in his family home, leaving behind several volumes of short stories, numerous essays, and two novels. Since his death, his undergraduate thesis, a third novel, and an address he gave at a graduation have all been published, and the sales of all his books are higher than before his death. An author’s suicide certainly makes them more glamorous, and the publicity surrounding a dramatic celebrity suicide (Foster Wallace hung himself on his patio, arms bound by duct tape) is always huge. Yet do we value an author’s words more if they are dead? And do we somehow connect genius and suicide? Sylvia Plath’s reputation is intimately bound up with her depression, and it’s impossible to read her work without considering it. It’s hard to say whether great artists are great despite their depression or because of it; some of Foster Wallace’s greatest insights come from descriptions of isolation and depression.  In one infamous passage in The Pale King, he explains how ‘everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it’. Perhaps mental illness allows artists greater insights into the darker workings of the mind However, it cannot be beneficial to view artists only through the lens of their personal lives. Foster Wallace’s death  was a result of his medication’s gradual failure to work, not a growing disillusionment or hatred of life. It is easy to romanticise the deaths of iconic figures, but it would be a disservice to Foster Wallace to see his death as just another piece of his art, defining and affecting our view of his writing.

‘You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer’

Tom Cutterham burrows deep with the meta-and meta-meta-levels of DFW’s short story collection

Sometimes a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference, like when a few grains of sand become a beach, or a few casual conversations become a friendship. The difference between Foster Wallace’s short stories and his mega-novel Infinite Jest is like that too. With the latter, the soul of the thing is its size. And the short stories, at least the ones in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, are soulless.

In the title story, which isn’t actually a story – none of these are really ‘stories’ – and which is spread out in four places through the book, men talk about themselves, especially their love- and sex-lives, in response to a hidden interviewer whose questions are simply rendered ‘Q.’ On a meta-level – everything here is on a meta-level, we’ll get to that – that’s what this book is about. One voice speaking, trying to answer a question no one can hear.

Foster Wallace’s stories are a performance of self-questioning anxiety. In ‘Octet’, for example, it is the anxiety of writing: this is a story, in the form of a series of ‘pop quizzes,’ about writing an ‘unworkable’ story– ‘Pop Quiz 9: You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer,’ and so on. But in ‘The Depressed Person’, it is the anxiety of self-exposure. ‘The depressed person,’ it starts off, ‘was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor of its essential horror.’

Reading ‘The Depressed Person’ is meant to be, and is, like talking to a depressed person: it is a test of mental strength in which your initial sympathy is systematically worn down. By the end, not only are you disgusted with the depressed person, but with yourself, for your own moral failure. Like I said, these are not really stories, not even ‘experimental’ ones. They are experiments to which you subject yourself.

Everything here is on a meta-level. And a meta-meta-level. Foster Wallace can’t just worry about what he’s doing. He has to say that he’s worrying, and then worry about the fact that he said it, and what that means. He can’t just be self-conscious. He is conscious of his self-consciousness, and of his consciousness of his self-consciousness. Of course, Foster Wallace is both the unfortunate fiction writer and the depressed person. It’s only in that context that the infinite reflection of meaningless sadness in his stories could be more satisfying to us than it was, in the end, for him.

Nearly finished

Christy Edwall tries (and fails) to conquer Foster Wallace’s novel  Infinite Jest

In the summer of 2010 I read one fifth of Foster Wallace’s mammoth Infinite Jest (which has a total of 1104 pages including endnotes in the paperback edition, and has a shipping weight of 1.1kg) but never finished it. A friend of mine discovered DFW just before this past summer and – after slaying volumes of essays and short stories – moved onto Infinite Jest in August with the aim of finishing it within two months. It is the end of October and just 70 pages from the end (excluding notes), he still hasn’t finished. We’re not slow readers: Foster Wallace’s books are ballast round the ankles.

What is it about his novels that weighs one down? The narrative hook is present, his linguistic pyrotechnics engaging; the novelist is ostensibly the same writer as the essayist. Perhaps it is because in Infinite Jest one is dealing with a tome rivalling the Exam Regulations in heft. Half the battle (the battle with one’s will) is fought before one opens it. But it isn’t just size. Anna Karenina, for example, at around 900 pages, is a jaunt.

Perhaps it suffers from what Craig Raine describes in his essay in the latest issue of Areté as Foster Wallace’s excessive language: the verbose adjectives, minute and specific non-essentials (‘encyclopediac’ says Raine), the lists, the exclusive acronyms, and the sense of drug-induced proliferations. Perhaps, it’s because DFW’s reputation gets in the way. He is now, for better or worse, known as a young dead ‘genius’ writer. Infinite Jest is known as ‘hard’, the way Ulysses has been. To have read and finished it is to be awarded bragging rights. One inevitably begins it with the feeling of invincibility, like starting a marathon too fast. Soon you can’t look at it without feeling slightly sick, a slow-acting intimidation becoming a sickly unwillingness to re-engage, to defeat, to end. Is it worth beginning a project (probably) doomed to fail? If the writer is doomed to fail (taking a line from Beckett), why shouldn’t the reader? Or perhaps, to rearrange an old cliché: it’s better to have read David Foster Wallace and stopped than to never have read it at all.

 Infinite Summer

 Madison Mainwaring embarks on a summer reading project

Infinite Jest is a formidable novel, both in the physical and cultural sense. Its 10,00-plus pages, with at least one hundred of those dedicated to Wallace’s copious and semi-neurotic footnotes, are difficult to fit in a backpack; and, while reading in public, one tends to receive looks which sway between the bemused and annoyed. The book’s name itself has become a bomb, dropped casually by those eager to demonstrate their literary sophistication.

And then there is the heaviness of the subject material itself: the inquiry into addiction presented in a way which mimics the addictive experience; the encyclopedic, self-referential nature of the text which threatens to swallow the reader; and the unavoidable dark corners of Foster Wallace’s prose which one cannot but help link to his suicide.

To navigate these difficulties, one can find support in the form of the online community of Infinite Summer. The network of IJ devotees was created by Matthew Baldwin, a contributing writer to the magazine The Morning News, who started the project as a tribute to the deceased author. He instigated the season-long challenge in 2009, thus managing to turn one of the heaviest of books into the summer read of thousands. The novel was divided into 12 sections, with 75 pages covered each week.

The project’s website, infinitesummer.org, has been at a relative standstill since the summer’s conclusion and 2009 will always be the year most closely associated with the phenomenon. But the website is active, and the wealth of tips and insights for the novel’s reading are still available.

I was at first skeptical when I heard of the project. How could a book, which seems to be devoted to the individuality and subjectivity of experience, be reflected upon in a group setting? And how could this be done on the Internet of all places, where the facelessness and flatness of text seems contradictory to Foster Wallace’s plea for empathy?

Then, on a bus, I met an active participant. Matilda (who was otherwise a complete stranger) was the first one to tell me about Infinite Summer. She had reached page 400 or so, a few sections behind schedule; but she said that she had only managed to get to that point because of the community of fellow readers. The website was monitored by four guides, who expressed their sincere reactions to the book, both positive and negative. People were willing to admit their appreciation and confusion, their sense of hope and depression in response to IJ. Matilda spoke of her own sense of anxiety after reading the first fifth of the book; what allowed her to trust the author in his work was the idea that other people were doing the same.

This seems to be an experience shared on a collective scale. I spoke with Avery Edison, a writer and comedian who was recruited as one of the four guides for the Infinite Summer project. ‘It’s no secret that Infinite Jest can be a struggle to get through for some (most?) people,’ she said. ‘There are parts of the book that are hard to digest, and it can be helpful to think of the individual bites rather than the whole meal.’

Her advice to those just starting out: use two bookmarks (one for the main text and another for the footnotes) and, if you’re having trouble getting through it, treat it like an assignment.

Edison found the public arena to be a motivating factor for the reading of and reflection on the book, but also vocalized the dangers of such a collective. ‘I think this was one of the central themes of the Infinite Summer project — the desire to avoid canonization of DFW, while at the same time never wanting to denigrate or under-praise him.

I think it’s unavoidable, at least while it’s so relatively soon after his death. Perhaps in 10 or 15 years, if such a project happens again, [it may be] more honest and raw. Responses to the work will emerge. It was hard not to read the book as the opus of a martyr because that’s what it is.’

Since 2009, the collective reading experience has been relived. There was an active Facebook page dedicated to those who attempted to do so in 2010. No such follow-up occurred last summer, but the blueprint still offers a plan that can easily be adapted to any point of time or situation. It is not yet too late to join in the shared tribute that is Infinite Summer.

A posthumous publication

Foster Wallace’s literary agent talks to Barbara Speed about putting together The Pale King

The Pale King,  like Northanger Abbey, most of Kafka and all those extra appendices of The Lord of the Rings that no one reads, is a posthumous book. Published after Foster Wallace’s death, it was found on his desk, nearly finished, by his wife Karen Green and literary agent Bonnie Nadell. Foster Wallace’s longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, then edited and published it with the subtitle ‘An unfinished novel.’

Bonnie Nadell, talking to Cherwell about the process of editing a dead man’s book, said that she and Karen felt a duty to have the work ‘read and recognised’ after Foster Wallace’s death. Pietsch made a vow when editing to avoid adding any scenes; only removing parts that seemed extraneous to the plot. Nadell has enormous faith in Pietsch’s editing, saying, ‘Michael spent an enormous amount of time figuring out David’s intentions for this novel and I think it is best, when the editor knows the author’s work intimately, to follow as closely that vision as possible.’ A new paperback edition is coming out in April, with some of the removed chapters included. ‘The additional pages in the paperback are scenes that did not fit with what already existed of the book as a whole,’ Nadell explained. ‘We felt that it would be fun and interesting for readers and scholars to see other possible scenes and ideas that were not as fully fleshed out, or simply were plots that never were finished or resolved.’

Publishing a book after an author’s death is controversial, and it is hard to avoid accusations of trying to cash in on unfinished works. However, the determination of Nadell and Pietsch to tamper as little as possible with Foster Wallace’s manuscript means that this novel is unique – an insight into the processes of writing and editing, and a compendium of Foster Wallace’s last ideas. Explaining the subtitle, Nadell endearingly says, ‘It is called an ‘unfinished novel’ so no one would be disappointed when they bought it, thinking it had a resolution.’ It is up to the reader to imagine how the novel might have been finished: a fitting way to demonstrate Foster Wallace’s ongoing influence, and to ensure his ideas and memory live on.

We’re halfway through the term, which sounds like a cause for celebration – except that it’s cold outside and everyone’s got loads of work. Opinion is divided as to whether the ‘Fourth Week Blues’ or the ‘Fifth Week Blues’ are worse (for our part, we tend to get both), but it’s not all bad news: Mixer is back to give you a taste of all the new music you missed because you were too busy reading Marxist critical theory, or something. So, without further ado, here we go: twelve of the best tracks of October. Make yourself a strong coffee and press ‘play’.

The King Khan Experience – I Got Love

Classic funk jostles with raucous, Stooges-style garage rock – this track sounds like a manifesto for reviving the phrase ‘far out’. The self-titled EP from King Khan’s new project means he could soon become more famous in popular culture for his wild sounds than for having once thrust his naked buttocks into Lindsay Lohan’s face at the Cannes Festival.

The Roots feat. Big K.R.I.T. – Make My

A fat slice of juicy, cerebral hip hop? Lovely. Soulful production from Khari Mateen and a guest appearance by up-and-coming MC Big K.R.I.T (check out his track ‘Somedayz’ for more – smooth) bode well for the new Roots album Undun, scheduled for release in December.

Summer Camp – Down

Alright, so this is more of the same from Summer Camp, but it’s nice to see that their twee-pop enthusiasm remains undimmed by the onset of winter (even if Elizabeth Sankey is, as she claims, as ‘sick of cold nights’ as the rest of us). Their new album Welcome to Condale came out on the 31^st October, hence the cute Hallowe’en house party-themed video for this track. Seasonal whinging aside, this is a wonderfully wide-eyed, fuzzed-up indie belter, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Future Islands – Balance

October saw the release of On the Water, the third and latest release from Baltimore synthpop trio Future Islands. It’s a great listen from start to finish, but ‘Balance’ particularly stands out, borrowing the fluid basslines of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and the shimmering synthesizers of The Cure (in the late ’80s, natch) to awesome effect.

Factory Floor – Two Different Ways

Okay, we cheated: this new track isn’t out (on DFA Records) until later in November, but we couldn’t possibly have left it out. Factory Floor are without a doubt one of the most exciting bands currently performing in the UK, having drifted in recent years from noisy guitars to synthesizers, and this eight-minute electronic composition is a riot of beats and analogue synths, set to reaffirm the trio as a major innovating force in contemporary music.

Chairlift – Amanaemonesia

You won’t find the word ‘amanaemonesia’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, because Chairlift made it up. We’re not sure what it means, but it probably has something to do with the amanae massage technique. To be honest, though, who cares? Chairlift have been making divine noises for half a decade, but this five minute single might have the breakthrough potential to crown them the new MGMT. Or maybe it’s just too weird. Judge for yourself.

Tom Waits – Bad As Me

Where the hell do you even begin with Tom Waits? His twisted, whisky-drenched growls and howls have inspired and repelled in pretty much equal measure for nigh on forty years. He consistently treads his own path of gleeful, wild-eyed genius, a stumbling, crazed survivor from the last generation of mavericks. And on ‘Bad As Me’, the title track from his first new album in half a decade, he’s on form. That should be all you need to know.

Sandro Perri – Love And Light

This Canadian multi-instrumentalist began his career playing rhythmic electronica, but more recently he’s been incorporating more and more elements of acoustic folk. This is perhaps the high point of that formula, a sublime convergence of shuffling, breathy beats with melancholic guitar.

King Krule – Noose of Jah City

A low key change of gear from the New Cross-based artist formerly known as Zoo Kid (or occasionally Dik Ooz) sees dub echoes nestling around simple guitar lines, an almost garage-style drum machine, and above all Archy Marshall’s idiosyncratic voice. There’s a slight feeling that if Pete Doherty hadn’t pissed all his talent up the wall this is the sort of thing he might have been doing by now, so coming from someone born in 1994 it makes us feel old, jealous, and very, very impressed.

The Field – Arpeggiated Love

Don’t let its ten-minute running time intimidate you: this is a smooth and accessible take  on Axel Willner’s loop-based brand of techno, off his recent album Looping State of Mind. ‘Arpeggiated Love’ is an expanding, glowing soundscape, full to bursting with clattering beats and phasing synthesizers, and totally justifying its length.

S.C.U.M – Athens

Although it was recorded last year, this track comes out just in time to be vaguely relevant to the Eurozone crisis. Part of S.C.U.M’s Signals project, which has so far seen them release tracks recorded in and named after Warsaw, Berlin, and Paris, ‘Athens’ is the best so far: pitch-dark, pulsing, doom-laden, but with a light touch that (retrospectively) anticipates their recent album Again Into Eyes. The video by Ivana Bobic is pretty great as well.

Mazzy Star – Lay Myself Down

If you’re not already a Mazzy Star fan, it’s difficult to express how exciting this – their first new material in a decade and a half – is, but hopefully one listen will give you some idea. With Hope Sandoval’s gorgeous voice wrapped as tightly as ever around the haunting, folk-tinged instrumentation, ‘Lay Myself Down’ and its A-side ‘Common Burn’ promise great things for the as yet untitled new album due next year.

Mixer: October 2011 is also available (in an abridged form) on Spotify – click here to load the playlist.

Forget about the Final Destination franchise, which may leave you wishing you did suffer from actual memory loss. What I crave for in horror flicks of the 21st century is genuine terror and trepidation. I’m fed up of seeing a stereotypical group of 20-somethings drinking to excess around a campfire in the Middle of Nowhere™. Never do they consider what would happen if a wolf or bear or hockey mask adorned living corpse were to attack their sanctuary of unsafe sex. And amongst their frolics and fun, you can just about hear the rumble of Alfred Hitchcock spinning in his grave.

Of course, there are some exceptions to this inexhaustible rule. One of my favourite films of 2008 was the Swedish horror tale, Let The Right One In. With shots as chilling as blood in the snow, director Tomas Alfredson trialled his visual style in a film about the friendship between two young misfits, before having it universally confirmed by his recent Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. He brought a crafted artfulness to the creepy atmospherics, in a very dissimilar style to Pascal Laugier’s equally as exceptional Martyrs, released the same year. Controversial upon its release in France, Martyrs begins like torture porn – albeit stylishly done – before heading in a very, very different direction. It’s one of those films by a true visionary; it’s an arresting meditation on pain and the purpose of suffering, which certainly outshined the gory and popular reappraisals of the Saw series. Yet at the box office Saw beat any film that even managed to stumble into the ring. When it hit the screens back in 2004, no one expected it to turn into a seven film franchise, especially not me, but the sledgehammer ending ensured that the sadistic Jigsaw and his puppet pal would live to kill another day. And another. And… you see where I’m going.

It’s fair to say the best horror films are those that innovate and thus reinvent the genre. For instance, taking account of a few anomalies (see 28 Days Later), zombies just aren’t scary anymore. If you want to find out why, look no further than Shaun of the Dead.  The only time when they do appear remotely threatening is when there are hundreds of them swarming you. But, then again, a hundred of ANYTHING is scary. A hundred muskrats, a hundred librarians, really, you name it, if there is over a hundred of something, I’m probably going to be scared of it. (Exception: grains of rice). And yet in the twelve years of this sorry century, we’ve seen so many ‘[insert time of day] of the Dead’ films as to ensure that the subgenre resembles nothing other than the last refuge of the talentless.

 That’s why it’s such a shame that the few underrated classics, as I’ve mentioned, continue to fall through the cracks (usually to make room for Friday the 13th Part 22: Jason Is Still a Dick). Now I know Hollywood isn’t really to blame – they’re an industry that only responds to a demand and so forth. But directors, please, once in a while, take a leaf out of Hitchcock’s book: forget your pantomime villains and your silicone-filled victims. I’d rather see you aim for the skies than for the jugular.

In everyday language, normal is synonymous with average. Never has this been truer than for the third film of the Paranormal Activity series. The first film was groundbreaking in the horror genre, opting for suspense and jump-out-of-your-seat moments, instead of the standard gore/shock films that have become so prominent lately. The only thing groundbreaking about this most recent addition, however, was the earthquake scene. The film starts out promisingly, with small noises or movements intertwined with what seemed like hours of camera footage, but then, in an attempt to ‘up the ante’, the scares towards the end become bigger and much less subtle, moving from the ethereal to the physical. It’s this marked change that means the film falls into the same familiar pitfall as other sequels (or prequels, in this case). The end result is a film suited for a slightly different demographic than the original intended.

But you know how it is; three times the film, three times the money. Let’s just hope they stop here and manage to retain some integrity. (Think of the Saw series; when the sequel number is larger than the amount of characters in the title, something is surely afoot). Perhaps I’m being a little harsh on the film; there’s no denying it was enjoyable and terrifying at the same time (if that’s even possible). It’s just they were in a lose-lose scenario. Shake things up a bit and risk losing your die-hard fans, or stick with the traditional format, and become boring to the masses.

The trouble with making a prequel (especially within a genre that depends on the unknown), is that we know exactly where/how the film is going to end. This is especially true if you were actually paying attention in the first two films, and not just cowering behind a cushion. Still, if you do decide to go and see this film, bear in mind that you will inevitably have to put up with those ‘too-cool-to-be-scared’ jocks, who will most likely spend their time making daft comments and laughing. If there is no one in your screening who fits this description, that’s because it’s you! 

2.5 STARS

It’s that time of year again when you can’t move for lists of the top ten horror films, characters, villains or inanimate objects. And as that’s a cliché, here’s a few more to make you cringe:

 1.   Sequels

What is it about horror films that makes them so easy to continue on forever (or until the reboot, at least)? Particularly as usually at the end of the film there’s only one or two characters still living, so the sequel is less of a continuation of the original and more of a lazy way not to have to think up a new title.

 2.   Lights going off

You know what it’s like. Whenever you need to investigate the creepy noise or empty building, either there’s a very coincidental power cut or those temperamental light bulbs blow out.

 3.   Point of view shots

Yes, I know that we need to sympathise with the main character, really feel their terror, but there’s something tedious (if not secretly a little enjoyable) about getting the same POV shot every time someone enters a new, and undoubtably dangerous, room. It’s like being trapped inside an idiot’s head, because the audience knows that venturing through that suspicious door is a bad idea, but somehow the hero doesn’t.

 4.  Having no sense of self preservation

That dark, spooky building where the murderer probably is must be a great place to visit. Especially at night, alone and without any means of communicating with the outside world. ‘I’ll be fine, I won’t take a weapon, they’ll probably just want to chat.’

 5.   That prophetic old timer or small child who knows something will go wrong

How do they know what’s going to happen? Maybe they should shout ‘Spoiler alert!’ before anything else; the hapless protagonists might pay more attention then.

 6.   Fake-looking gore

A film becomes considerably less scary once your attention is drawn to how unrealistic that decapitated head looks. It reminds you that this isn’t real and thus, you are safe. Some films need to take a tip from Psycho: if you can’t make the stabbing look real, don’t show it at all. It’s still terrifying in your imagination.

 7.   Lingering shots on items or places that will come back to haunt someone

Thanks for that subtle foreshadowing, generic horror film. I had no idea that the close up of the huge knife laying precariously on the table meant that someone would get attacked later. That cryptic clue of the light being on in the old abandoned house was helpful too.

 8.   Disposable characters

The know-it-all who thinks they can outsmart anything. The muscular yet foolhardy guy. The screaming blonde girl. The not quite important enough friend. That one nameless character at the beginning. All these people are going to die and you know it.

 9.   Use of ‘the’ in the title

You can almost see how the brainstorming process went. ‘Quick, think of a noun that sounds vaguely menacing. Add a definite article. Now, think up a plot.’

 10.   The ability to include all these clichés and still gain an audience

Despite the fact that many horror films are pretty predictable, packed full of one dimensional characters, and tend to be entirely ridiculous, we still watch them. Maybe it’s out of hope that this one will be better, maybe it’s to laugh at or maybe it’s out of genuine enjoyment, but someone must be watching these films. Clichés become clichés for a reason.

Go to the Burton Taylor pretty much any time in 5th week, and you’ll be met by fresh-faced first years, keen to show their Cuppers entry. At only £1 and taking up half an hour of your time, Cuppers is one of the best opportunities to see the range of dramas that Oxford has to offer. Cherwell’s contributors give you their take on the plays to look forward to…

ST HUGH’S

A group of St Hugh’s freshers are performing Punk Rock by Simon Stephens, a contemporary play that explores the complexities of the transition from childhood to adulthood for a group of affluent A-Level students. The flirtation, bullying and spontaneous interaction between the teenagers within the play creates humour and energy, yet there are also elements of heart-breaking darkness that expose the cruelty of teenagers desperately trying to mask their own fears. Based on his experience as a teacher, Stephens describes the play as ‘The History Boys on crack’ and we chose it because we felt that we could relate to both the characters and their situation.

Benita TIbb

KEBLE

In recent years, theatre companies such as Belt Up, Les Enfants Terribles, Dumbshow and The River People have brought dynamic, entertaining and engaging visual and physical theatre back to the forefront of the small-scale stage. This in mind, a number of us Keble fresher theatre fanatics spent a few days finding a play in a similar vain: one we thought would be suitably silly as well as vexingly thought-provoking. After stumbling through the odd Caryl Churchill and a couple of Ionescos, one of the cast introduced us to Anthony Neilson’s “Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness!”, a bizarre and brilliant suitcase comedy with oysters, pimples, pearls and the occasional planet. Two weeks into rehearsals and we’re thrilled to have found it: half our rehearsals have been spent studiously pouring over the text, the other half messing around with Neilson’s absurdly weird and wonderful characters. Whatever happens, we’ve had a ball – if you’ve got half an hour to spare (and if you’re also a fresher doing a humanity subject, you really have no excuse), come and spend a quid on what may well be an amusing and absorbing thirty minutes.

Giacomo Sain

BRASENOSE

Brasenose are putting on Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet, a bold and exciting choice, requiring the actors to speak a significant chunk of their lines in the language ‘Dogg’, which uses English words but with completely different meanings. Hardly what I would call ‘cheap and cheerful’, but James Fennemore, the director, seems relaxed about calling it that. Happily, he also seems to have grasped the spirit of cuppers: everyone who wants to be is in the cast, even if that means having nine women and one man, and they’re enjoying getting to know each other and those with experience are mingling easily with the drama virgins. It’s always sad when there aren’t any scientists in the cast, but that’s hardly James’ fault. I’m very excited about BNC cuppers – a hilarious play put on by a fun-loving cast: what could possibly go wrong?

James Blythe

ST HILDA’S 

Sex… It’s a complicated affair. Sex is about communication. Sex is about interpretation. It’s about connecting words and actions; actions that do not always reflect the words uttered. When she says no does she really mean yes? Is he just saying yes when he really wants to say no? This moment in history is unprecedented in terms of the legal protection on paper for sexual abuse, yet the number of successful prosecutions for sexual harassment or rape is still exceedingly low. Inspired by recent high profile cases, this play attempts to highlight the complexities of human sexual relations and to understand the underlying forces and attitudes of the individuals and of society in interpreting the roles of the victim and of the aggressor. Mens Rea is a detailed look into the complexity and subtlety of both verbal and physical communication and the dynamics of power in one of the most important and common acts in human life.Come see the world premier of Mens Rea, Thursday, November 10th at 4.30 pm at The Burton Taylor Studio. 

Ben Schaper

MERTON

Eight Merton Freshers will be putting on a production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (which first premiered at the National in 2003). Director Julia Doyle explains that the play is the story of a writer of quite dark fairytales who is taken to the police station following a string of copycat murders. In the half hour Cuppers performance time the Merton team will stage a couple of fairytales, cutting back to the police interrogation scene in-between. Julia tells me the juxtaposition of the small tense scenes with the police with the full-cast performances of the fairytale sequences will be one of the most exciting aspects of the performance – ‘it’s different’, she says, ‘and very dark, but there’s a lot of black humour too!’ She praises the opportunities that Cuppers gives to first-year thespians, the open choice of play and the chance for lots of people to get involved. When I ask why people should go and see this particular Cuppers entry she laughs and tells me ‘because it’s going to be good!’

Finola Austin

MAGDALEN

God is dead and we have an overwhelming urge to get laid.This is a play with no beginning, middle or end. Two Ancient Greeks in Athens are about to see a play they wrote and are acting in. But what if the audience are characters in another play? And someone else is watching them? Or what if nothing exists? What if they or we are all in somebody’s dream? Described by some as “bullshit” Magdalen Cuppers entry isn’t Theatre of the Absurd it’s just absurd. Yes, it’s written by Woody Allen but that doesn’t mean you have to be a New York quasi-intellectual to enjoy it. To be honest it’s more reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally. A multitude of contradictions and questions: explore the ideas further at the Burton Taylor Studio Wednesday 9th November, 7pm.

Miriam Goodall

UNIVERSITY

Duck Variations by David Mamet is not really about ducks. It’s a play about two old men sitting on a park bench debating the possibility of happiness. Yet, in true cuppers style, things are never that simple.We have kept the same script but re-imagined the scenes, jumbled them up and spread them across time and place, gender and age to explore just how we find happiness. We’ve got lonely clowns, young lovers, hyper children, and yes, a pair of bickering old men. Yet all are united by their conversations on a park bench. Its turned into a sort of Godot + sex + ducks + climate change. It’s all horribly arty and I love it.It also happens to prove quite a nice double bill of American theatre with the other of Univ’s entries into the festival, Autobahn by Neil Labute, which explores the hilarious and sometimes unsettling goings-on in the front two seats of a car. Expect people going round the bend, relationships moving into fifth gear and the bumpiest stationary car ride you’ve ever been on–to pick but a few of the many driving related gags possible.

Dan Frampton

NEW

Cigarettes & Chocolate is a radio play by Anthony Minghella, writer and director of The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley among others.It is a gem of a play. The story is short and sparse, like the play.It centres around Gemma, who has stopped speaking. Her anxious husband Rob and various of her friends all try to talk to her, including the friend who’s in love with her and another who’s been having an affair with the husband.None get a response and yet by talking to her they all find themselves learning something about themselves. It’s therapy in all but name.Gemma tells us in the final speech of the play that people are always “saying so much to say nothing”; that silence now has a comfort to it that before was only provided by the eponymous ‘Cigarettes & Chocolate’.The production will be simple and direct, like the writing. Come and see it! Cigarettes and Chocolate is being performed by New College on Friday of 5th week at 8:30pm.

Alex Darby

BALLIOL

Balliol ‘Room 253’, Balliol’s entry for Cuppers 2011, is an original work that focuses on a single hotel room over four consecutive nights.  Through the room, multiple people unwittingly become intertwined with each other, coming to intimately affect each other’s lives without ever meeting. The cast consists of all the dysfunctional denizens of the suburban middle-class  –  the frustrated wife and her oblivious husband; a philandering businessman and his bitter ex-wife; an educated, high priced call girl desperately trying to keep up appearances and her eternally worried mother.  Through the medium of the hotel room we gain the briefest snapshots of their lives, and see them unknowingly connect  in ways that become increasingly both comedic and tragic.

Angus Hawkins

TEDDY HALL

The year is 2006.  On the way home from a hard day’s campaigning, a young, unknown MP finds himself jeered at by three mysterious London vagabonds.  “Hail to thee, Leader of the Liberal Democrats.”“Hail to thee, King-Maker.”“Hail to thee, Deputy Prime Minister.”Nick Clegg’s story begins… The Tragedie of MacClegg is a Shakespearean look at the political career of our beloved Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.  It isn’t a ‘political’ play in that we do not attack Clegg or his decision to join the coalition; his ‘Tragedie’ in how he was transformed, almost overnight, from being the new political hope of Britain to being represented as its latest love-to-hate villain.   A brand new tragicomedy for the modern age – there will be laughs, tears, and one serious message for all future political generations: “I dare do all that may become a Lib Dem;Who dares do more is none.”

Tom Bailey

WADHAM

‘Choosing a play is always difficult, but from the moment I met with my cast, I realised the simplest thing would be to work with the raw “talent” that we had.  The Ugly One is a play about the intertwined relationship between beauty and success.  Do you ever worry that you are “unspeakably ugly”, but have failed to notice before everyone else?  To what lengths would you go to claim the power to which beauty entitles you?  Marius von Mayenburg’s absurdist satire aims to blur all notions of identity with fast-paced dialogue and a ridiculous doubling-up of characters.  We endeavour to leave the audience feeling entertained and slightly confused. ‘

Maeve Scullion

ST CATZ

“You see us as you want to see us in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.”In 1985 The Breakfast Club was released in cinemas to immense critical acclaim. It was lauded as the greatest film on teenage life. Now, for the first time, St. Catz are taking it from the screen to the stage in what promises to be probably the most epic half-hour of your life.Set in the detention room of an American high school, The Breakfast Club follows five students from different cliques. Trapped together, they are forced to connect, reveal their deepest fears and expose their disenchantment at modern society. Who should see this play? Anyone who’s ever struggled with teenage problems. Anyone who’s ever felt alone. Anyone who feels that the world is heading down the wrong direction. Anyone who wants to see mildly attractive people kissing on stage.Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you, The Breakfast Club!

Anirudh Mandagere