Recently one of these found it's way into my life-
It's called the 'Dyson Powerball' and it's release was greeted with a fair amount of fanfare amongst hoovering circles. The press that accompanied this new Dyson's assault on the world of vacuuming announced that the Powerball, or The Ball as I've decided to call it, offered- 'a new way to turn corners'. Fantastic, I for one know that I was bored with the old way.
To operate this over-engineered and over-priced piece of 21st century kit really is quite a profound experience,indeed we can read The Ball in a number of ways: a testament to the dogged pursuit of advancement and technological breakthrough combined with a ridiculous hyper-consumerism that leads to the design, manufacture and sale of such (unnecessary) products; as an object in purely aesthetic terms, some kind of retro-futurist sculpture that also seems to be constructed in the same vernacular as the ipod; as another example of Man's attempt to triumph over and harness the power of nature (it contains a cyclone after all). Despite all of these possibilities one truth remains- operating it makes you feel like you're piloting a space ship. This can be no bad thing.
Generally I like to hoover on Sunday mornings but it is a little early to blast of with The Ball so I have been nosing through some books I purchased recently from a charity shop. A chapter in a book by Raman Selden on Iser's particular brand of reader response criticism caught my eye, not because of the theory but because of the subject- 'The Homecoming' by Harold Pinter.
In the chapter aside from the usual 'RRC' comments (the interplay between the 'actual reader' the 'implied reader' and the book('s response-inviting structures) forming meanings and varying interpretations in pursuit of a shifting 'gestalt') were some ideas about the joy of Pinter that I found interesting, although I imagine to more astute readers these things are glaringly obvious.
I only discovered Pinter fairly recently (I am embarrassed to say) and found the experience of reading The Homecoming for the first time like being approached by an unassuming old lady on the street only to have her swear violently at you, punch you in the balls and steal your dinner money. Lines such as the one that open this blog are so joyfully over the top and yet precise that you can't help but to both laugh at them and ponder what they reveal about the characters who deliver them.
In the chapter Selden discusses how to interpret the pauses in the play, how to fill in the blanks without the assistance of the omniscient narrator we might find if The Homecoming were a novel. This is where the joy in Pinter (for me) lies, we are lead down alleyways and back streets of possible interpretation where we constantly loop back on ourselves. As the possibilities become narrower some of our ideas are confirmed, others are subverted and some are left open for us to ponder long after the play finishes. The whole time we are completely in Pinter's hands, the precision of the language the tool that allows him to form our responses and toy with them.
Obviously he's snuffed it now and that is, as far as I can see, a massive bummer. From perusing 'Various Voices' it's clear that this precise control of language could be turned to any subject; from war to politics and I do not doubt, to the various implications of The Dyson Powerball.
On wikipedia my favourite of the quotations credited to Sir James Dyson reads- 'I just want things to work properly.'
I've been imagining Pinter responding to this comment with-
'Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.'
