Lecture Theatre

I guess the one (?) time I ever saw David Thomson, at the ICA with JtN, would be a candidate for me - it didn't change anything in our thinking, but confirmed it, almost closed a circle. He was so Thomsonian (narrative, whimsy, memoir, film, slyness), and he also told JtN "you're my kind of guy", and told me over his cocktail or wine glass afterwards that, yes, sure, Joyce was trying to do that kind of thing too, with words, and images, and whatever. Actually I have just remembered how interesting that conversation was. Anyway: one of the more memorable performances.

xyw = post-Bergsonian allaphbed

I guess Reynolds' Rip It Up launch felt like a pretty significant event too, though SR himself was so tentative and rather lame (this all had a thread to itself).

Trying to imagine future biographies talking about the artists and thinkers who *probably attended that night* and were *probably shaped irrevocably by it*

I do find this question interesting - when I started as an undergraduate, I think I expected this to happen to me on a reasonably regular basis, but normal lectures don't seem to allow the lecturer to have much of a personal touch. I can't think of a single u/g lecture where I've gone 'wow, this has irrevocably changed the way I think'.

On the other hand, the open seminars provided by different departments have more of this feel, and I was particularly taken with one on 'Fragments & Ruins'. I'd never really thought about the subject before, but post-lecture I was particularly enthused by the topic, have incorporated some ideas I got from it into my dissertation, and may well go on to study it further. So, um, if I were to ever climb out of the quagmire of mediocrity then I suppose that would be one.

so who was presenting that? and what did it involve? architecture? Walter Benjamin?

It was Sophie Thomas, from the MA programme it looks like I'm going to next year. The main theme I took away from it was the complex relationship with temporality that both literary fragments and physical ruins (and especially sham ruins) have - there's an embodying of both the detritus of the past and the potentiality of the future in unfinished objects.

Richard Rorty, was it 1999? - more irascibly impatient, answering questions, than his genial page persona would have suggested.

*not* so good: Don Paterson reading and discussing his fairly arrogant aphorisms chez LRB.

also not so good: Jon Savage reading about and discussing his fairly dull proto-teen history chez LRB. talk over the free wine afterwards was smashing though.

Paul Muldoon, effusive, genial, and knowledgable. Immediately prior to the release of "The Horse Latitudes". Aberdeen, 2006.

Not so good: Paul Morley, pre- the abyss of ubiquity. Glasgow, 2005?

I got really riled up at a lecture recently, and it maybe clarified a few things for me in its wrongness, and my thoughts on how I should respond to that wrongness, etc.

But it's hard to say -- I mean, ideas don't just transmit like that, usually. Often when I get inspired by a lecture it's just a reminder that yes, it can be done. "Yes we can" as they say.

Funny but remote: Konrad Schiemann. London, 2008.

Your Morley was probably 2003 or early 2004, wasn't it, shortly after W&M?

is he really more ubiquitous now than in 1981 or 1984, or even 1989?

Maybe it's true that ideas don't transmit that much through lectures - but still, cultural & intellectual history are often written as though they do. Bergson the classic instance; Saussure different perhaps as 'his students wrote it all up' and that was the influential version? - but other names too, I think: Husserl's and Heidegger's lectures are supposed to have been 'influential' - or is this only through being printed and published? (I don't care about them anyway, so never mind.)

I guess it's true that a lot of Influential and important texts *were* lectures: Woolf's Room of One's Own or 'Mr Bennett / Mrs Brown', for instance; some of Eliot's essays (though maybe not the most influential ones); even Jameson's PoMo started out as the spoken lecture reproduced in Hal Foster's Postmodern Culture?

just wondering about how the intellectual history / impact aspect of it works.

oh, and Kojeve on Hegel, pre-WWII? - that's another classic instance where people are supposed to have been profoundly influenced (but again, maybe by the printed text.) ... and Derrida's 'Structure Sign & Play' was a load of new, hitherto unread spoken words once!

Jacques Lacan likewise.

Kripke's Naming and Necessity was based on lectures, too. Some of Wittgenstein's stuff as well, I think...

Lacan at that same US bash you mean? Or his 'Seminaires'?

Peter Ackroyd, South Bank, in ... when was this ... 1997 maybe? unwilling, answering questions, to relinquish the idea that places had their own mystical identities that ensured continuities of land use -- my first encounter with Psychogeography in a way?

heidegger post-war presented a lot of his most famous works as lectures--question concerning technology is the one that pops up off the top of my head but im pretty sure there were mroe

Sorry, I meant yes that for a long time there was very little of Lacan available to read that wasn't a transcript of the Seminaires.

I guess *loads* of major works turn out to have been based on lectures: Raymond Williams' The English Novel (1970) is another, and later work of his overlaps with that. And this must have been true of Leavis, let alone Richards ... well, Leavis published a Lectures in America volume, but actually, no, his books are often made up of essays and reviews from Scrutiny, which is a somewhat different kind of source material.

a lot of derrida's later (and earlier too i guess) published stuff started as papers presented at conferences--spectres of marx, of spirit, force of law--i dont know if that counts as lectures tho...? does "lecture" imply open to/intended for the general public?

I saw George Steiner at QE Hall, South Bank, in - when was it? - 1996/7, again? - and have never quite forgotten it (not to say it was brilliant).

well, the original question was just about our actual experiences of these spoken live events, and wondering whether any of them have ever had the impact that they are always said to have (the way people write about Derrida's talks would be an example). but these other issues of the lecture as a motor of intellectual history, publishing, etc, are interesting too.

among worst lecturers I have ever seen: Gayatri Spivak

oldest (neither best not worst) lecturer I have seen: Frank Kermode

actually, one good reading / event: Kurt Vonnegut, October 1990, drawing diagrams to show his folksy theories of narrative.

Not actually a lecture but I have never seen a film with a talk/Q&A session attached that hasn't been a dud. Mainly bcz of the questions people ask.

Oh, that reminds me: how about David Lynch / Donovan, promoting Transcendental Meditation? Saw that last autumn: I guess it appealed to people whose lives had already been changed. Questions / answers from crazy to dud.