Freshman Seminar -- please advise

I'm proposing a freshman seminar course on NO for the university I teach at (Webster U in StL,MO). Trying to focus on some fiction readings to have students chew on and need some help/suggestions.

Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh seem a great pair for my purposes, but perhaps too much? or else too easy with the movies for Trainspotting and Amer Psycho thrown in (ie, they'll watch the movies instead of reading the books!). The Acid House or Ecstacy collections from Welsh may do, but I find them a bit uneven.

There seems a host of cyberpunk stuff out there that I personally relate NO to, but which may take more explaining to get the connection rather than discussion aimed at the heart of the matter and NO itself. Plus, it seems cyberpunk in general would make the point better than any one book or so specifically makes it a can of worms and the class will be more about that stuff than NO. McCaffery's Storming the Reality Studio is under consideration nonetheless.

I've even considered Milan Kundera's :"Laughable Loves" for a unit around the theme of love/relationships in NO. (I love you/don't touch me; I hate you/ touch me please) I'm thinking the solution is to create a reader with stories and excerpts that apply. Help in this regard would be much appreciated.

In general I'm interested in smart challenging stuff that speaks to the postmodern culture and theory I tend to associate with much of NO's material. Issues of surface/language/image, pop/culture and distance/decadance (voyeurism?) as well as others -- though I will have to (and here's the problem) tone down some of this rhetoric and theory to make it accessible to freshman. Hence a reader of shorter things they can grapple with may prove better than one or two longer books.

Other books they'll have at hand: Designed by Peter Saville, Hiding in the Light by Dick Hebdige (or Subculture, but I tend to like Hiding better esp for the Talking Heads analysis and the Italian scooters -- both more on target here I think), perhaps and I'll say again perhaps "True Faith: the armchair guide" and Mick Middles book on JD+NO+Factory (not the best I think, but more available than others) -- I find a lot of the literature on NO directly to be lacking. [and in this regard I will point to the cover story from The Wire Sept'93 as having the sort of tone I like]

Also considering some more music-theory stuff like Attali's Noise and Barthes' Image-Music-Text (both of which may work nicely on a few levels)

In closing -- and what maybe should be up front here -- what I have always found compelling about NO is their transcendence of labels, ability to make great music amid turmoil, and their ability to remain outside of pop and sub cultures while affecting both (they are neither and BOTH).

Anyway, this is my first post here though I've been trolling for a while. I know I've thrown out more than a few bigger ideas and a heap of rhetoric here that should be qualified at greater length. Please be kind in this regard.

Thanks.

Just a few thoughts to start off with:

I haven't read Barthes myself, but from what I know about his discourse on illegibility, he would be very relevant. One thing about NO is that they often don't completely make sense - they have ways of drawing you into the music, but then completely distort any sense of a cohesive narrative (usually through the lyrics). There's something consistently off-center about them. Does that make sense? Even the sound of Hooky's bass feels off-center, in a sense. It's all slightly OFF, slightly unsusual. It creates a marvelous mystique. Also, the sense of humor they have about themselves is key. The lyrics are freely interchangeable with lyrics about boners and cunts in the live setting, and anything that the band seems to mean sincerely is subverted. It reminds me of Godard and Bunuel in that sense, the irony and rather deliberate use of aggressive rhetoric. And their whole craft is consistnetly flawed and downplayed; their constant mistakes live and so forth could perhaps be interpreted as structural in a way. Are you into American avant-garde film at all? In a weird way I think there might be some sort of relationship there between something like Michael Snow's film WAVELENGTH - drawing attention to itself and its illusions, and all with a sense of humor. But I would definitely have to think about that a lot more.

As I said with the illegibility thing, the art of Manet leaps to mind. Impressionism seems relevant in a way. And of course Saville's usual decision to NOT mention title and name of band on his sleeves, etc. Very aggressive in a way. And his design of the first Durutti Column sleeve is about as aggressive as record sleeve design could POSSIBLY be. And of course Saville's many references to minimalism and its spawns. And Factory's emphasis on numbering everything, even events in individuals' lives (FAC99: Rob Gretton's Molar Reconstruction, etc). This attempt at the reduction of even abstract events in life to numbers and a part of a grand serial grid.

Also: KENNETH ANGER. Do you know him? American avant-garde filmmaker. One of the very first to make extensive use of pop music as a film's soundtrack in SCORPIO RISING. Like Saville, he takes lots of influences from antiquity and places them in a very modern context that places emphasis on LIGHT and SPECTACLE (the cover of TECHNIQUE is a perfect example). Also, there is a lot of homoeroticism throughout Anger's work, as there is in at least some of New Order's songs (1963, The Perfect Kiss, etc).

But I suppose there's something in their earlier work - the deliberate obscurity of the identity of the band and its compliance with the Factory numbering aesthetic that reminds me of Warhol. Of course, it is a "FACTORY" producing everything, as well. Their aggressive rhetoric reminds me a LOT of Warhol's films, as well. ALSO their whole concept behind Blue Monday as a means of playing an encore without beign onstage!!! VERY Warhol! Take the artist out of the scheme and leave it to machines/others. Of course, the band loves The Velvet Underground, so they undoubtedly have at least a vague familiarity with Warhol's work - although an informed knowledge is hardly necessary for the influence to still exist.

But I think drawing some kind of link between Saville's sleeves (or any band and their album sleeves) and their sense of identity. That seems key.

I'm sorry that so many of these ideas are half-baked. They were all just kind of coming to me and I am also rather hungry and tired at the moment. But I will be sure to post more if I think of more. I hope this was helpful in SOME way! I think it's great that you're teaching a course on New Order - I think that developing a school of scholarly attention to pop music is crucial, and is something I would like to devote myself to eventually, if it weren't for my dedication to other areas. But who knows? I plan to at least write some about New Order someday.

Good luck! I'll post back more if you found this helpful or at least interesting.:D

Someone had to

douglas coupland's "generation x"?

yeah, coupland's gen x is a consideration -- just not sure it has the depth (and breadth) I'm looking for. Leaning more (and also forgot to mention above) something like Don DeLillo's White Noise -- which is removed enough from the whole "gen x" phenomenon (which I don't think really applies to NO so much as pomo in general which is infinitely deeper if that's a reasonable thing to say) and stands still as relevant good literature.

really need to check out some of the film stuff KLF mentions. aside from the usual suspects by way of Story and 24hrPP, I'm planning to show Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World and have them propose a NO song for the soundtrack -- a startling omission from what is otherwise one of the best soundtracks of all time. Not to mention the movie pretty much captures the spirit of global culture ala McLuhan.