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Oh I see. Can't edit my own posts. Thanks Yuku. You're really graet. Ah I see the problem. As War Arrow I can't reasonably expect to edit a post by War Arrowfactionparadox whoever the FUCKING BUGGERING SHIT that is supposed to be.
Ahem.
Continued: from above mentioned link...

143. ...To me, the modern world seems hopelessly, repellently bland: the art is bland, the music is bland, the language is bland... My past seems covered in textures and designs for which I still have no adequate words, and even under the skin of the present, I can see a layer of human experience that might take whole lifetimes to survey and catalogue. But then…

145. Finding new words is important to me, although I can only make a crude, lunging attempt at explaining why. The last time I listened to any newfangled pop music was in the period 2004-05, when I was writing the Top Forty Countdown (it's probably still on-line, somewhere, but I forget where). These days, whenever I hear something from that year - whenever I even think about something from that year, the epoch of "Babycakes" and Vicious Break-Up Pop - I feel a chain of sensations I literally can't describe, triggered by the music rather than a direct consequence of it. I say "sensations I literally can't describe" not because I don't have the articulacy, but because no human language has ever considered sensations of that type to be worth sharing. In 2004, I was living in the same house, and spent most of my time surrounded by the same sights, sounds, smells and solid objects. Yet with hindsight, that time has a certain… surface. The music of the era doesn't bring back "memories", it suggests something far more tactile, a texture of thought rather than a collection of individual events. The best comparison I can think of is the way we can instinctively tell the difference between something shot on film and something shot on videotape. We all have this ability, apart from my agent and everybody's grandparents, but nobody can explain exactly what the difference is. We might mumble words like "sharper" or "depth of focus" in an attempt to sound as if we know what we're talking about, yet the truth is that film and video simply feel different, and we have no common language for describing this properly. My memories as a three-year-old use a different type of film-stock to my life in 2007, and there's no way I can vocalise it.

I thought this was one of the most interesting points LM has made in ages, and certainly states his case a lot better than the 'novels are crap' thing a few months back. The thing that seems odd to me is that this thing he calls 'surface' (as good a term as any) is something I look for in a good novel, and I'd kind of assumed it was the same for most people. In respect of that, I'm not sure it's really fair to have a go at the limitations of language. The most evocative writers (those with 'surface' coming out of their ears whose novels can almost be considered a form of time travel) for me, are often those whose prose is the least cluttered: Bill Burroughs, Bukowski, DH Lawrence, Rudolfo Anaya. I'm not sure why this should be so but I'm guessing that an economy of a few well chosen words gives the reader just the right clues to fill in the detail with non-verbal elements - if that makes sense. I'm kind of getting at the less-is-more ideal. Take dance music for example, I'm no expert, but it seems the stuff that really works is the simplest, which leads to the falsehood that dance music is easy because it's simple, when actually simple is very, very hard to get right (much more so than complex), which is also (I would argue why (on a purely emotional level) The Ramones will always hit you harder than Gentle Giant. LM has moments of surface, though on that score, I don't think he compares so well to those above, or even to Phil Purser-Hallard and, to a greater extent, Will Self, both of whom write with a little more complexity and yet still convey a good sense of surface. The restrictions of language are obvious - as is apparent from comparison of English to any significantly different tongue - Nahuatl (for close to home example) comprises rather a lot that translates to English only by very indirect means (there's a verb somewhere which is 'to drop something causing a slapping sound' and I swear I'm not making that up) so it seems a bit of a non-starter to blame one's (apparent) failings on the language, or lack of it. I think LM just needs to develop a more balanced method of assessing his own writing (which he certainly seems to give short shrift at present) and hence a method of working around the potential shortcomings of the language, as (I think) is found in the writing of those named above.
Not sure if this is likely to draw comment, but I'd be interested to hear any other thoughts on this.

Hmmm. Someone tried to convert me to Gentle Giant having just successfully weened me onto Jethro Tull (whom I now rate highly, although to be fair, I was already well disposed towards them on the strength of Witches Promise) and though I can appreciate GG, I just found them a little bit too elabourate and too far removed from my normal 50 Cent shaped comfort zone - that's just my personal taste though, not a judgement of quality and musically speaking you can't fault them for aiming high.
Anyway...

Of course, the problem with Larry's cultural analysis is that, since his only source of knowledge of the outside world is TV, he tends to overestimate how much the programming which he correctly identifies actually works. Despite what quacks like Baudrillard will tell you, ordinary people do understand the difference betweeen TV and their everyday reality, since the two often contradict each other.

That whole ghost point idea really got to me as well. In fact I spend a good few weeks obssessing over it. True about LM's non-involvement with the outside world, and though I think there's a lot of good points in his TV-as-culture thing, it's a lot more complicated than he seems to think.

PS. I'm overgeneralising when I say 50 Cent shaped comfort zone. I seem to like most things, though prog and classical are very much Marmite genres to me - I love the stuff I love and just can't understand the stuff I don't and, though I've tried, the 'give it time and it'll grow on you' theory just doesn't seem to apply.