SOUNDTRACK: LOS BITCHOS-“Bugs Bunny” (2018).
This is another single from Los Bitchos.
Of all of their releases, this one is the least interesting to me. But I like their songs a lot so it’s not like I dislike this one.
I rather like the way the song shifts speed midway through though–it certainly adds some fun to the song. And the whole ending is a wild ride of excitement.
I’m not really sure what the music has to do with Bugs Bunny, though.
[READ: July 14, 2020] “Single-Handed”
This issue of the New Yorker has a series of essays called Influences. Since I have read most of these authors and since I like to hear the story behind the story, I figured I’d read these pieces as well.
These later pieces are all about one page long.
I feel like Barnes gives the most honest answer to the question of who your Influences are.
He says that when British writers go to Spain they are asked if they are always asked if they influenced by Tom Sharpe–a writer of jocose farce: “student embarrassed by acquiring large quantities of condoms, inflates them with gas, stuffs them up his chimney, someone lights the fire, the chimney explodes.” Sounds hilarious, can’t believe I’ve never heard of him. The trick when asked this question is to keep a polite face while pretending to ponder this question.
In France, they assume a British writer is inspired by Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll and Monty Python. Barnes of course watched Monty Python but feels that nothing he has written is in any way indebted to them.
Barnes has a reliable group of favorite authors that he cites as influences, but he feels that he is “uninfluenced by anybody.” This may sound like a psychopathic level of denial, but it seems to me to be true.
He says he revered Flaubert and rereads him constantly but as a 21st century English novelist, he does not refer to a 19th century French novelist for his inspiration
Besides, Flaubert wrote like Flaubert, why should Barnes want to write like Flaubert?
He can read influences in other writers but he wants to convince himself that no one else has ever written a novel like the one he is about to write (this is naive a vain, sure, but it is necessary).
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