On Esoterik Satie
I mentioned Erik Satie in a recent post about music to write by. And then I came upon the book Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by the music critic Ian Penman. It’s just the sort of book I love. Written in three parts using three different treatments, the middle being in dictionary or encyclopedia format. It’s fairly well known that Satie was a bit of a weird fellow, what with his umbrella obsession, his proclivity for eating only white food, and his hoarding habit.
If you know his music, the two pieces that will likely first come to mind are the Gnossiennes 1-3 and The Gymnopédies. But there is a lot more music composed by our bowler hat wearing, corduroy and velvet suit loving Satie.
Even if Satie isn’t someone who interests you in any particular way, I would recommend the writing of Ian Penman. John Banville wrote in The Guardian of this volume: “One remarkable aspect of Three Piece Suite is that in its more than 200 pages there is not a single word of adverse criticism of its subject. Ian Penman is of an unfailingly cheerful disposition, which makes his book a delight to read, but you cannot but wonder if he never finds himself even a teeny bit exasperated by Satie’s relentless whimsy…”
If you’ve read the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows you might know the epigraph by Steven Wright, “I read the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.” And I did delight in the middle section of this book by Penman “Satie A-Z.” Under “ANGEL” there is: “Blurry, with well-defined edges. Umbrella wings. Soft, caressing, harp-like music with an undertow of unassuageable melancholy.” Penman points out “Angels, too, wear the same raiment all their lives…whether that life is infinite, or a single flickering spark.” (I still get happy when I see angels mentioned in a book in a non schmarmy way since writing my angel book).
It’s a friend of Satie who gives him the nickname, Esoterik Satie. Satie coins the term “Furniture Music” and Penman says that today he is “an ambient pioneer, a repetition guru…”
A while back I wrote about typewriters and pianos and the fact that the first prototype of a typewriter was made using piano keys. So I was delighted to read Penman: “Thinking about visual rhyme between a piano and the keyboard I’m typing this on.” He talks about how he is haunted by an Olivetti he used in his teens, how he prefers his keyboard to be separate from his computer. All of which I completely get.
Penman’s Satie book reminded me somewhat of books like Tim Carpenter’s book on photography, and Moyra Davey’s Index Cards. Writers, thinkers, listeners, see-ers, who insert themselves into the subject at hand. For me that brings an immediacy, an authenticity. Davey says at one point, “I am trying to find a new way to work.” And these books create an avenue for those of us who are wanting to try to write about things without being smoothed out in an ai world. They also quote, refer, acknowledge sources. They connect things that only a weird and engaged human mind will. They’re all a bit weird, I guess, and all I can say is, bring on the weird please, writers, artists.
