Slurring Words is playing with words, the experimental and improvised stirring of sounds, phonetics, syntax, structure, language. Music, film, but mostly literature, this blog is a place to explore new and exciting forms, usually identified as ‘cult’.
Cult and Culture
An article from the Telegraph last year defined a cult novel as ‘intangible, different from simple best sellers – although many of them are that’, concluding ‘you know a cult book when you see one’. Problematic and vague, I would instead suggest that cult literature, in particular, reshuffles our expectations and understanding of form and language. Perhaps it brings to mind the crushing nihilism of Albert Camus’s L’etranger, Kerouac’s fumbling On the Road, Howard Barker’s ‘theatre of catastrophe’ or perhaps Rob Halpern’s fearless Music for Porn. Cult is, then, the status we attribute to creative works that define certain junctures in culture.
A definition such as mine looks backwards and forwards at the same time – what literature, film, music, at present, will have lasting prominence? Looking to Penguin’s Modern Classics imprint will startle this definition – does someone decide which books make the ‘classic’ status, never mind ‘modern’ classic, an ambiguous oxymoron itself. Revisiting novels, poetry and plays, and examining literature published yesterday, will allow for some enlightenment.
Perhaps the cult status will become clearer as the blog progresses, perhaps more disorientated, but this is certainty a topic worth investigating. Contemporary literature is also a treacherous road, and this blog should help to navigate it.
Slurring Words 