There’s Always Disco, and Other News

From the cover to Patrick Cowley’s Muscle Up.

Hey, you! Egghead! Ponce! Academic intellectual hippie freak! Get a real job! You don’t know shit about real people! You wouldn’t know a working man if he put a gun in your mouth! “People who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies,” Michael Lind reminds us. “They—we—are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.”

Patrick Cowley died of an AIDS-related illness in the early eighties, but his music—a lubricious, synth-driven, incorrigibly uptempo variant of disco that came to be known as hi-NRG—survives him. A recent spate of reissues has found him getting overdue posthumous credit: “Cowley’s influence as a producer was cited by new romantic acts such as Pet Shop Boys and New Order; the critic Peter Shapiro recognized his work with Sylvester for ‘pretty much [summing] up the entire disco experience.’ And in recent years, his profile has assumed a new dimension as listeners and scholars excavate disco’s intersection with gay liberation … [His early output] captures Mr. Cowley’s affinity for synthesizers’ potential not to replicate sounds but to forge new ones. Tracks murmur and thrum or surge and palpitate, flush with bleary murk and melodic curlicues reminiscent of earthen atmosphere and galactic ascent alike. The duality evokes the carnal grit and transformative, escapist role-play that characterized sexual scenarios available to intrepid San Franciscans.”

In which Amie Barrodale searches for the elusive sources of her fiction: “My work comes from my life. But after my first collection of stories, I made a vow to myself: no more of that. I began to think about writing a novel about a pedophile who undergoes some kind of elective treatment, some kind of brain surgery, some kind of stimulation of his illness that forces him to basically go through the hell of his own mind, his own sickness, to come out cured. I began to read about pedophiles. But on the side, as I worked, another story emerged, about a miscarriage, a miscarriage I had last year. What I mean is that for me, for better or for worse, my life presents itself as a story sometimes … One thing I would like to do, one day, is be able to describe what is happening in my mind. Sometimes I just make strange sounds in my head, I notice. One day I’d like to know what happens in there.”

Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novels Pamela and Clarissa have plenty to say about victimhood and agency—even as they defy contemporary standards of morality. As Amy Gentry writes, Pamela is “a prolonged tale of sexual harassment in which, for several hundred pages, the hired servant Pamela fights off her employer Mr. B.’s unwanted advances … Together, Pamela and Clarissa represent Richardson’s fundamental misunderstanding of rape culture. He mistook women for human beings at a time when it was illegal for them to be. That’s an endearing mistake you won’t catch Austen making — not out loud, anyway — not so the men can hear. But Richardson’s mistake was a fertile one. Out of his strenuous attempts to give us a sense of Clarissa as a human being with agency who nevertheless had no control over her own violation came one of the greatest triumphs of literature in English — Clarissa’s very soul — the agency she exerts from inside the depths of powerlessness and madness simply by continuing to write.”

Mary Wellesley takes a trip to Alexander Pope’s grotto, recalling its extensive history: “Over time the grotto’s purpose changed. In 1739, Pope took the waters of Hotwells Spa in Bristol, and was transfixed by the geology of the Avon Gorge. After that, the grotto became a shrine to the majesty of geology. Pope was influenced by his friend William Borlase, an antiquarian, who espoused ‘physico-theological’ ideas about geology as evidence of the work of God. Pope decorated his grotto with crystals, shells, ores and spars, ordering shipments of material from distant parts of the country. After a spat with his friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she described it as ‘a palace beneath the muddy road’, which was ‘Adorn’d within with Shells of small expense/Emblems of tinsel Rhyme and trifling sense.’ ”

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