Coattails

There's a really good piece on author Ian McEwan in the February 23 edition of the New Yorker magazine. It's an excellent read on its own, but there's one passage in particular that set off some sparks re the creative process...

In that passage, McEwan and fellow British author Martin Amis each offer their own comparisons and contrasts of each other's work, and the language the use can be applied to so many other things: McEwan describes Amis' writing as more "expansive and musically performative [their italics]," but that he himself is much more concerned with "the pulse of the sentence" and writing "chamber music [as opposed to] orchestral music." Amis proclaims a greater allegiance to "surface" as opposed to McEwan's interest in "undercurrent," and he thinks McEwan is "more interested than [he, Amis] has ever been in very subtle gradations."

I think it only hit me so hard because my recent work on Pasir has been on the same level of gradation-- the piece as it stands now (mid-evolution) is very much centered around the beans-in-flowerpot sound object, and the fact that it vacillates between being a granular, noisy object and a harmonic, pitch-y sort of object. Almost everything that's grown up around that sound plays off of one of those two aspects.

It's also nice to read about wildly successful artists who have processes that are similar to yours. The film execs should be calling any minute now...

So: any of you folks McEwans out there? Any Amises? Hybrids?